White rice goes head to head with jelly in the sharpest blade stakes, but only one can win.

Ever since Japanese YouTuber Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami surprised us all with a knife made from dried bonito, the clever craftsman has been honing his skills along with his blades, experimenting with more unconventional materials like pasta, plastic wrap, and even aluminium foil.

Now the YouTuber is back with two new surprising blades, and he’s adding them to a scale of sharpness to show just how great the finished result can be. So let’s get right to it and take a look at how these incredible blades are made, starting first with his knife made from jelly.

The first step in the process here is to melt the small pieces of jelly in a pan on the stove.

After adding a bit of food colouring and gelatin during the heating process, it’s then simmered for three hours, before being poured out onto a flat tray and cooled in the refrigerator overnight. Then it’s time to cut a piece out, using a traced-out image of an ordinary knife, from which point on it starts to resemble the end product.

The jelly hardens after being left to dry overnight, and then the whetstones are brought out to give the jelly a razor-sharp edge. The jelly blade then becomes so sharp that it cuts through paper and easily slices through cucumber.

Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami then gets the mad idea to melt his handiwork all over again, reversing the process by pouring the jelly into their original small packs, before setting them in the refrigerator and then serving them up on a plate, proving that the blade is entirely edible!

And the result? It turns out that the jelly knife is surprisingly sharp, ranking in at number three on the craftsman’s list of non-metallic creations.

Now let’s take a look at the making of the plain white rice blade.

In the video, we can see how the craftsman begins by grinding a small cup of uncooked polished rice until it becomes a fine white powder. After adding the powdered rice and a couple of aluminium oxide balls to a glass jar, he creates a homemade mill using a metal frame and two rollers, and then sets about rolling the jar with his hands…for a whopping 40 minutes.

As his hands tire after the long process, Attoteki Fushinsha no Kiwami shows his ingenuity by setting up a drill so that it rolls the jar for him.

▼ The no-hands rolling then continues for an impressive 12 hours.

The next step in the process is to add water and knead it into the powder until it forms a dough-like ball. After that, it’s rolled out and placed into a zip-lock bag which has the shape of a knife drawn onto it, and then it’s cut out and rolled again so that it begins to resemble a knife.

It’s then heated, first with boiling water and then a couple of minutes in the microwave, before being left to dry for two days. Then it’s finally time to sharpen the knife using a series of whetstones until it’s sharp enough to cut through a cucumber and pierce a plastic water bottle.

▼ Transparent, but with a razor edge.

So where does this one rate in terms of sharpness in the non-metallic blade collection? As it turns out, it’s actually the winner out of the two blades we’ve seen today, slightly edging out the competition and pushing the jelly blade into fourth place by taking the third-place spot, just behind the pasta knife, at number two, and the sharpest of them all, the carbon fibre blade, in first place.

So there you have it – not only can you make a knife from rice, but you can make one out of jelly too. All it takes is some simple ingredients, a huge serving of elbow-grease and a bucketful of determination. But once you’ve made your one-of-a-kind knife, nothing is sure to be more satisfying than using it to create a snake cucumber. Watch how it moves!

Source: YouTube/kiwami japan
Top image: YouTube/kiwami japan
Insert images: YouTube/kiwami japan (1, 2)