A New Chapter for Savernake Knives
What makes the perfect knife? It’s a question we have grappled with since our inception. In fact, it’s what drives us forward – forever testing, tweaking and honing new designs, materials and methods in search of this elusive goal. Although we continue to perfect our craft we have come to the realisation that there isn’t the perfect knife, only your perfect knife. And so we have worked every single one of our customers to give them their version of perfection, combining subjective form and objective function to meet their needs.
Through this journey with our customers we have discovered the key elements of knife making: craft, geometry, weight, balance, excellent materials, passion and precision. These are our core tenets, the very essence of who we are.
With these guiding principles, we set about creating a new range of knives for those who seek technical excellence without the time, effort and cost required to make a custom knife.
Why DNA?
We thought a long time about what to call our new range. We wanted a name that reflects not only the stripped back design to those elements which we believe are fundamental to good knife making but also our British heritage, which is mirrored in the range. After a lot of deliberating we settled on the name DNA as we believe that it encapsulates both of these strands pretty perfectly.
British Born & Bred
We wanted the DNA range to reflect our British engineering and industrial heritage that we so proudly draw upon and so we set about creating it exclusively from British materials from British suppliers which are designed and hand finished by us in our Sawmill.
Blade:
We’ve collaborated with Granton to create blades to our own designs. Granton has roots in Sheffield going back to 1601 and is one of the city’s oldest and most storied knife makers.
The steel is a fresh batch of Sheffield’s Silver Fox, hardened, iced and tempered to our exact specifications to achieve a Rockwell hardness rating of 60C – which we consider to be the optimum (and hard-to-achieve) balance of toughness and sharpness for a knife blade.
The blades are refined and finished by our craftsmen in Wiltshire, before being sharpened and despatched to our customers.
Handle:
We have also spent much of 2021 experimenting with in-house handle construction, and have devised a special blend of polymers, additives and pigments that allows for an aesthetically striking handle, that is cool and comfortable to the hand, responds well to hard use and adds the balance and heft that we have been searching for. The DNA range is available in 8 different handle options, ranging from the traditional to the outlandish.
Rivets:
The rivets used to attach the handle to the tang of the blade come from long time partners of ours Barmond Special Steels in Sheffield.
The Range
The full range consists of 8 knives. The knives are closely modelled on some of our custom blade shapes and we have chosen a range that covers every knife based culinary task. We have included both European and Japanese style blades of all sizes in order to cater for all cutting and chopping techniques. For carving and slicing based tasks the PC26 Carver is equally adept at filleting beef as it is slicing up a lovely crusty loaf of sourdough and will make light work of carving a succulent leg of lamb. We’ve also included the GT11, aka the barman’s best friend for slicing up lemons and limes.
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