This Portland Knife Factory Hosts Free Cooking Classes With the City's Best Chefs

About 20 people filled a building on NE Sandy Boulevard in Portland's Hollywood neighborhood. They were there to learn how to break down a whole raw chicken from Carlo Lamagna, the chef of an award-winning restaurant in Southeast called Magna Kusina.

But they weren't in a commercial kitchen or at a cooking school. They were in a factory — the space where Steelport Knife Co. has been making award-winning American-made culinary knives since 2021. Workers sanded down Steelport's unique solid-wood handles as Lamagna and members of the Steelport team set up the cooking demo.

The March 28 event was the latest in a series the Portland-based knife manufacturer has been running monthly for the past year. On the last Saturday of every month, they invite Portlanders onto their factory floor to learn from some of the city’s best chefs.

Founder and CEO Ron Khormaei says these events are all part of a bigger mission to help build a community of home cooks in Portland who "appreciate the fact that there's more to cooking than ordering DoorDash." He sees the Steelport factory as a vital third space where home cooks can gather to learn directly from some of Portland's best chefs — and hopefully venture out to explore more of the Hollywood neighborhood afterward.

For Khormaei, these cooking demonstrations offer an unparalleled experience he equates to "going to pray in Mecca or Vatican City."

Recent demonstrations have featured chefs like Ryan Roadhouse of Nodoguro; Earl Ninsom of Eem, Hat Yai, Langbaan, PaaDee, Phuket Cafe, and Yaowarat; and Tyler Malek, a co-founder of Salt & Straw.

For Eytan Zias, Steelport's co-founder and chief bladesmith, getting to eat home-cooked food from some of Portland's best chefs is the real perk. It's a level of access you can't get anywhere else in Portland.

Speaking of Ninsom, the chef behind some of Portland's most acclaimed restaurants, Zias said: "You're not going to sit there with him [at his restaurant] ... So, it's a way to offer it to the community here, but also for us, too."

This was true during the March 28 event, where the audience engaged in friendly banter with Lamagna as he tackled one of modern home cooks' most feared tasks: breaking down a whole chicken. As he demonstrated how and where to make key cuts to the joints of the bird, he extolled the benefits of butchering your own poultry — from cost savings to a more complete use of the animal.

While modern grocery culture has conditioned generations of Americans to rely on pre-processed cuts of meat, Lamagna explained how with some simple home butchering, a single $17 chicken could turn into three or even four meals for a typical family.

"As soon as you understand how to break down a chicken, you can break down a lot of other animals," he said.

Starting by removing the wishbone, Lamagna outlined how to use the bird's anatomy and the various parts of the knife to make the butchering process easier.

"You'll see that at every joint there's always a fat line that runs along the bones along the tendons," he said. "You can use those as guidelines for where to make the cuts."

His tips ranged from age-old advice — never cut toward your body — to craftier workflows, like using the back of the blade to scrape meat from bones.

Throughout the demo, Lamagna used Steelport's boning knife, which features a narrower blade with just a little flex and a built-in guard to protect your fingers during the slippery process of butchering meat.

Steelport's knives take a unique modern approach, blending highlights from high-end German and Japanese knife manufacturing with some original touches of their own. The 6-inch boning knife, which retails for $350, is crafted by hand using a 134-part process that starts with the forging of steel at foundries in Pennsylvania and Indiana and finishes in their Portland factory.

When Steelport set out to design their knives, they focused on creating a new American style that blends the best of both Japanese and German manufacturing — at a competitive price point for a fully American-made handcrafted knife designed to last generations.

Steelport uses 52100 carbon steel for all of its knives. Zias says this steel has always impressed him for its ability to hold an edge longer than other steels. What sets it apart, he explained on the company's website, is its "balance of sharpenability, edge retention, and toughness."

Most American manufacturers focus on high-quantity, mass-produced knives, often stamping blades from sheets of metal for a market more focused on price than quality. Zias took a different approach. After more than 30 years around kitchen knives — from work in professional kitchens to his experience as a renowned sharpener and forger of blades — he focused on what he'd heard from chefs throughout the years to craft blades that tackled major shortcomings while incorporating the best lessons from other manufacturers.

Like high-end Japanese knives, Steelport's carbon-steel blades are hard, thin, and light. Like German blades, they use a durable drop-forged full tang design — meaning the steel runs the full length of the knife, from the tip of the blade to the bottom of the handle. Each knife also features a handle made from a single piece of locally sourced Gobi walnut wood, hand polished to give each knife a one-of-a-kind look.

It takes roughly 29 days to make a single Steelport knife, not counting the time needed to turn raw materials into workable products.

One of the perks of hosting these events in the factory is the chance to show off that process — the care and thought that goes into each knife. While the louder steps of production are paused on event days, a worker is on-site to sharpen customers' knives. (Free sharpening for life is a benefit Steelport offers all buyers.) Attendees can also preview the full line, from the boning knife to a custom-designed bread knife and a steel-infused wooden and composite cutting board.

No purchase is necessary to attend. But at the March 28 event, Khormaei sweetened the deal: everyone who bought a knife that day received a $50 gift card to Lamagna's restaurant.

The real goal of these events, though, comes back to something simpler.

"Make a connection," Zias said. "Not only do they make a connection with the chef, but they make a connection with each other."

It's a chance to learn more about a local company bringing back a way of manufacturing that takes pride in quality and craftsmanship.

"It's probably the epitome of what the American dream was and should still be," Lamagna said of Steelport.

Steelport's chef demos take place on the last Saturday of every month at their factory located at 3602 NE Sandy Blvd., Suite B, Portland, OR 97232. RSVPing is recommended.

Looking for more free and low-cost cooking classes around Portland? I track them year-round in the Stumptown Savings Events Calendar — it's updated regularly and always free to browse.

I wrote a version of this story which first appeared in The Hollywood Star News.