Kurt Glatt

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany · High Performance, Handcrafted Kitchen Knives

Kurt Glatt

Messerschmiede Glatt

Kurt Glatt forges kitchen knives as Messerschmiede Glatt in Freiburg im Breisgau, on the western edge of the Black Forest. His signature is the Brute Forged finish — forge texture left standing on the blade flats as a deep treebark surface — usually paired with blackout hardware, copper chevron inlay, and takedown handles in bog oak and brass. He works in Apex Ultra and AEB-L across monosteel, san mai and five-layer gomai construction, in releases small enough that they rarely stay available long.

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About the maker

On the workshop

Kurt Glatt forges kitchen knives as Messerschmiede Glatt, working from Freiburg im Breisgau on the western edge of the Black Forest. The workshop is a working forge rather than a production line, and its output reaches past the blades themselves — cutting boards and wall-mounted knife racks built from local timber and leather, and smithing courses that put other people in front of the same anvil. It is a practice that stays close to the fire, and the knives carry that openly; the forge is not something the finished blade is asked to conceal.

On the workshop

The steels are Apex Ultra and AEB-L, worked as monosteel or laminated — san mai, five-layer gomai, cladding in S700, pure nickel layers, wrought iron and damascus where the piece calls for it. What is most immediately his own is the Brute Forged finish: forge texture left standing on the blade as it came from the hammer, a deep treebark surface across the flats set against an edge road and geometry brought to a clean, fully resolved cut. Around that sits a consistent set of details — copper chevron inlay let into the handle, blackout finishes, takedown construction, bog oak and brass. The profiles run through gyuto, bunka, nakiri, kiritsuke, petty and slicer.

What distinguishes the work is the refusal to treat surface and performance as a trade-off. Glatt's own account of his practice is a long-held interest in function and beauty held together rather than ranked, and the knives bear it out: the roughest-looking surface on the blade sits directly against some of the most controlled grinding and finish work in the piece. For Modern Cooking, Messerschmiede Glatt belongs in the Collectors Selection as a distinctly German expression of contemporary forge work — knives that read as objects at rest and behave as tools in the hand, made in numbers small enough that they rarely stay available long.

Steel preference

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Signature finish

Brute Forged

Cutting edge steel

Apex Ultra

Low-alloy fine-grain carbon tool steel

Typical HRC
64–68
Corrosion class
Carbon
Production
Conventional
Origin
Austria (ApexUltra project — developed by Larrin Thomas, Marco Guldimann and Tobias Hangler; FFG-funded, associated with Messerschmiede Hangler)

Apex Ultra is one of the most carefully engineered non-stainless kitchen knife steels in modern circulation — a steel designed from the ground up specifically for handmade knives, rather than borrowed from another industry. It was developed by metallurgist Larrin Thomas together with smiths Marco Guldimann and Tobias Hangler. It is a low-alloy carbon steel — roughly 1.25 percent carbon, 2.6 percent tungsten, 1.5 percent chromium and a 0.4 percent vanadium addition, with manganese and silicon kept low. That composition is tuned for high purity and a fine, evenly distributed mix of chromium-enriched iron carbides, tungsten carbides and vanadium carbides — the structure that lets it hold a very hard edge without the coarse carbides or plate martensite that sap toughness in other high-hardness carbon steels.

What this means for a cook is unusual permission. Apex Ultra carries very high toughness in the 66+ HRC range — the highest of any knife steel its developers have tested at that hardness — so you can ask a maker to grind it thin and run the heat treatment hard, and the edge will hold far longer than the carbon steels smiths usually forge, without microchipping. It forges and forge-welds much like 52100 or 1.2562, sharpens cleanly on natural and synthetic stones without needing diamond plates, and its modest chromium slows patina a little — though it is not stainless and should be cared for as a carbon steel.

Apex Ultra has become a signature steel of the European maker community, and the Modern Cooking catalogue carries an unusually deep bench of smiths working in it. Tobias Hangler himself heads that group, alongside Marco Guldimann, Benjamin Kamon, Martin Huber, Jonas Johnsson, Karol Karyś, Birch & Bevel, and MCx. It is genuinely a step forward — one of the relatively few cases where the marketing claims and the underlying metallurgical data are saying the same thing.

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Cutting edge steel

AEB-L

Fine-grain martensitic stainless steel

Typical HRC
60–63
Corrosion class
Stainless
Production
Conventional
Origin
Sweden (Uddeholm)

AEB-L is the original fine-grain razor stainless — a steel developed for safety razor blades and rediscovered by knifemakers as one of the most refined stainless choices available. About 0.67 percent carbon and 13 percent chromium, with very low impurity content, allow the steel to take a near-carbon-grade edge while remaining genuinely stainless.

In a custom or boutique kitchen knife AEB-L typically lands at 60–62 HRC, sharpens with the easy feel of a clean carbon, and produces a polished apex that holds an edge longer than its modest carbide content might suggest. Toughness is exceptional: at 62 HRC, AEB-L compares well to 52100 at the same hardness in published toughness data, which is the point that contemporary metallurgical writing on the steel has emphasised. It is the steel that taught a generation of makers that stainless need not feel coarse.

AEB-L is heavily used in the modern American custom scene and is an honest answer to the cook who wants the feel of a clean carbon without the maintenance burden. Among the makers Modern Cooking carries, Lew Griffin and Oliver Märtens work in AEB-L. It is closely related to Sandvik 13C26 and a direct ancestor of 14C28N.

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Limited release

Reserve your place

Kurt Glatt's work is highly sought-after for its distinctive combination of craftsmanship, performance, and design, with each piece produced by hand in extremely limited numbers — a pace of production that naturally cannot keep up with demand.

For those hoping to secure a piece through Modern Cooking, joining the waitlist is the best way to register your interest in Kurt's work and share your preferred dimensions, design preferences, and intended use. As opportunities become available, we use this information to guide future allocations with care and consideration.

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