A gift that lasts

Story

Ramon Elzinga and Shannon Dolman first met in high school. In the ensuing thirty years they’ve forged a lasting friendship through a love of good food, cooking and making things that last.

The Koi Knives story begins in Shannon’s father’s workshop, where he worked as a blacksmith specialising in making springs ‘for everything.’ Shannon started working in his father’s steel factory and with ready access to steel and machinery, Shannon and Ramon began making knives as a hobby. ‘We’d been tinkering around and wanted a few more machines and better steel and we had to sell a few of them [the knives] to support our hobby,’ says Ramon. ‘And it turned out there were a few people to buy them.’

Initially, Shannon continued working for his dad while Ramon worked in tech, knifemaking just ticking away in the background. However, things took on a more serious turn when Ramon had a health scare in 2018. While taking stock of what was important, he made the bold decision to make knifemaking his primary focus.

The Koi Knives story progressed from there. Together the pair continually upskilled while obsessing over every detail, always looking to make improvements to their design and technique. ‘There are always twice as many knives that are not available because we can’t help make new ones,’ says Ramon.

‘It’s like my son, he likes making Lego and if he makes an awesome truck one day, he wants to make a better one the next day. We’re the same. We’re never happy and as we have said to one another, the day we are happy we will retire, but I don’t really see that happening.

I mean, there are 14,000 different types of steel and that is even before you have thought about the handle or how you finish the steel.’

The finishes on Koi Knives’ steel are beautiful and each razor-sharp blade is balanced and perfected before being sent to their specialist handle-maker here on the Fleurieu. Their handles incorporate local materials including offcuts from old vines. Imperfections in the wood are filled with beautifully coloured resins and polished to a shine.

While Ramon and Shannon initially anticipated that their customer base would be chefs, they’ve been surprised by the number of their knives finding their way into the home kitchen. The backbone of their business has turned out to be people buying gifts for that someone who has everything, or the enthusiastic home cook.

Ramon was kind enough to leave a selection of the knives for us to try and each food cutting experience was a joy. The classic culinary challenges of cutting through bread and tomatoes became an effortless dream, even in novice hands. The skin slid off my kiwi in razor thin strips, creating no waste other than the flimsiest furry residue for the compost bin.

In 2022 their pursuit of excellence led them to the co-development of a ‘platter picker’, working alongside Kris Lloyd of Woodside Cheese Wrights. Together, the three endeavoured, over many shared platters and wines, to create a new product to solve that evergreen platter challenge – how to stab a pickle or olive with no release mechanism. While the platter picker is still in development, we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it. An evening or afternoon spent with a delectable platter filled with fine Fleurieu produce can only be enhanced by the platter picker.