Shochet's 3 Best Friends (Star-K/Daf)

I'd like to introduce you to the Shochet's three best friends. First, to the Sforim, the Simlah Chadasha, which is a Kitzur of Hilchos Shchita, which was written by the Tzur Yishar. It's a classic. In fact, Shochetim are enjoined to chazer it every month, and this edition even has it broken up into a monthly limud. This is the Beis Dovid, the Shulchan Aruch of the Shochet. One of the most beautiful Halacha Sforim ever written. It carries major haskamos, including a rare haskama from [music] Rav Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk. When I was learning Shchita, I didn't know which sefer to use, and they and the old Shochet then told me that you got to get a Beis Dovid. He he didn't have any children, and because of that, he wrote a sefer. He said it was holy, should be a zchus for him like children. These are a Shochet's chalef. From a small chicken chalef, a lamb [music] chalef from the famous home J.D. Miller & Sons from the Lower East Side. World-famous chalefim that go for tremendous amount of money today still, even though they haven't been produced since the '60s. This is a calf chalef, and this is what we call a gassus chalef. A chalef for beheima [music] gassa. The metallurgy is borrowed from steel houses all over the world. Shochetim are always [music] looking for the next best steel. The knife is meant to be perfectly smooth and extremely sharp. The knife is structured in a way [music] where the spine is thicker and it's ground down to a very, very fine >> [music] >> edge. And this brings us to the third friend of the Shochet, the stones. This stone is a black surgical Arkansas stone from the Washita Mountains, one of the most prized glatt steiner, or a smoothing stone. The technology for stones we borrow from the straight razor world. Even though the Torah doesn't allow you to shave your face with a razor, but you need their stones in order to turn your knife to a level of keenness and sharpness and smoothness that nobody ever needs for a kitchen knife. This is a Japanese clay stone. The red side is rougher, and the white side is smoother. This is a diamond stone. Little tiny particles of diamond are laid into these plates at different levels of coarseness and fineness. Diamonds are harder than metal and they efficiently grind off the metal that we don't need. This is a Japanese ceramic stone. It's one of the newest technologies and it's made out of a ceramic that's extremely extremely hard and efficient and we're seeing more and more shochu use these stones. Although the final finishing shochu prize this the old natural stones. In fact, there's a famous stone called the German green stone or the escher stone from the Thuringian region in in Germany which you see for sale sometimes shochu sell them to each other like the Miller halofen for thousands of dollars. And these are the shochu's best friends. >> You have to use stones. Now, the first one [music] is a rough stone because it you you want to wear down the metal. Usually two sides, you know, the it's very rough on one side and and not so rough on the other [music] side. But both of them is you can't go into a straight afterwards because it it's it'll make a drot which is a wire on the on the metal and you have to take it off. So, you take it off with a smooth stone. You look for imperfections in the stone itself. Usually black dots or something like that meaning [music] you'll take this the the drot off but you're rubbing it on top of something else that [music] has some kind of imperfection in it. So, you you have to get your stone that are that are basically they're they're perfect. >> [music]