Blades of glory: the scissors that will last a lifetime

When it comes to bladed equipment in the kitchen, the focus is understandably on knives. After all, these are the workhorses of any set-up. But there’s a limit to how many you can feasibly use — or lust after. Which is why chefs have turned their attention to another smart tool: scissors.

Whether they’re used for topping and tailing green beans, cutting butcher’s string or prepping fish, scissors are the unsung heroes of the kitchen. Like knives, we tend to use and abuse them without a thought until they let us down. Unlike knives, though, because they’re difficult to sharpen, when their edge is dull they end up being tossed aside.

Until now, that is — when new ranges have been produced, with two halves that twist apart, enabling them to be cleaned and sharpened more easily.

The first comes from Katto, a forge set up by two friends in 2018 whose slogan is “Japanese steel, British craft”. Alongside a beautiful range of knives and pans, barbecue tongs and a lustworthy £45 garlic crusher which looks like a medieval instrument of torture, is a pair of scissors handmade from AUS-10 steel in their Sheffield workshop. The clever design incorporates a nut (or lobster) cracker, a bottle opener and a robust, curved blade that will tackle anything from fine snipping to deboning fish and small poultry.

Josh Roberts, the brand’s co-founder, believes “nowadays people want to own fewer, better things. Things which last. Things which they’re proud to own. Things which make their days — and dinners — better.” He claims the £45 scissors are a simple, affordable pleasure that elevate everyday tasks to something far more enjoyable, “whether that’s snipping herbs, slicing pizza or chopping tinned tomatoes. There’s a warm, cosy smugness which comes from having a brilliant, long-lasting version of something which is usually rubbish and disposable.”

The Japanese specialist Kitchen Provisions in London sells something similar, the Diawood Japanese scissors (£44), which also come apart for sharpening. While over at the Japanese Knife Company you can spend £212 on a pair of Mount Fuji scissors by Mcusta Zanmai, which have the tell-tale shimmering, rippled patina of Damascus steel and are as much objects of beauty as razor-sharp cutting utensils.

For the ne plus ultra of scissor design, however, we turn not Japan but Germany’s Black Forest, where the disruptor company Horl continues to reshape the sharpening and cutting business. Father and son Otmar and Timo Horl are the pair behind the revolutionary Horl rolling sharpener, which combines the gentle abrasion of Japanese ceramic honing stones (which are far better for your blades than pull-through or electric sharpeners) with a precision of angle that is hard to achieve by hand and eye alone. Timo had been clearing out the basement of his engineer father’s home when he came across an abandoned box containing the rudiments of the sharpener. So he applied his designer’s eye to it and in 2016 the Horl sharpener was born.

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“My dad always says that because of me it looks good, and because of him it works,” Timo says. Its genius lies in the fact “it’s so simple a child could use it”.

Although the pair produce about 8,000 sharpeners a week, when customers asked whether scissors could be sharpened on them the answer was no. That’s because scissor blades are typically sharpened to a 45-degree angle, as opposed to more usual 15 or 20 degrees for knives. But rather than creating a new sharpener, Timo says, “we thought, ‘Hang on, let’s turn the question on its head. We already have a sharpener that works well, let’s make the scissors match it.’”

Forty prototypes later, they have achieved just that: a beautiful pair of scissors which, thanks to the clever design, can be pulled apart at a touch and then balanced on the worktop at the correct angle to be passed over with the Horl sharpener, ensuring a lifetime of keen edges. Expensive at £349, for sure, but well worth its place on the magnetic knife rack.

“Sustainability is in our DNA and if it’s possible to make a product that will last a lifetime, why not?” Timo says. “People say, ‘What about the market? You can only sell it to each customer once.’ But I say, ‘It’s much more fun this way, and besides, the world is a big place.’”

katto.shop, kitchenprovisions.co.uk, japaneseknifecompany.com, horl.com