Whats the best way to sharpen a kitchen knife?
I’m with Alton on this one (do watch the youtube clip. It’s very useful); I like a professional doing the maintenance on the knives I’ve really invested in. That said, I’m also the sort of person who only wants a qualified, trained person fiddling with the engine in my car, so maybe it’s a me thing. I figure, I’d rather pay the $4-ish bucks a knife to get a perfect job every time and a knife that lasts a lifetime. I’m really very uneasy with electric sharpeners. I worked in a kitchen store for a few years (and sold tons of knives) and I never felt comfortable selling those things. They aren’t very, well, nuanced. I saw a lot of people mangle good knives with them. Even the best ones don’t have very many levels of grit to slowly work down the edge. Also, people tend to get a little mad with the power and sharpen far too often. As for a honing steel, that’s sort of the equivalent of putting gas in the car (whereas sharpening is more like having the oil changed).
stet’s link to the Chad Ward piece starts us off in the Twilight Zone of Sharpening; there are some opinions masquerading as fact, some facts, some pictures that look like they should support facts, some Metallurgy 101 that isn’t too applicable to sharpening Knife X made of Guessed Material Y, and some fine DYI spirit holding it all together. It’s not nearly as entertaining as Iron Lizard’s link, and for DYI spirit Iron Lizard wins hands down, but the Chad Ward piece certianly took some work, and it does contain some good attitudes in regards to recognizing that kitchen knives aren’t supposed to be surgical scalpels, and may have different sharpening requirements for different uses. The one big thing lacking in Chad’s piece is a good method for visualizing the actual edge a person sharpening by hand creates, and some method of comparing it to previous efforts.
I’ve never met an electric sharpener I thought was worth a damn, but there could be one out there, I suppose. And I can’t stand the sound they make. Anyone can get excellent results sharpening their own knives with a little patience. The crucial element is the jig. A jig is a device that holds the knife at a constant angle to the sharpening stone or, as in this kit, the stone at a constant angle to the knife. I have been putting very fine edges on all our knives for years using that kit, and I am not a dexterous person. It takes a little time to catch on to when the knife is sharp. Basically, you are whetting the blade on either side until you’ve brought it back to a sharp edge. You know you’re almost there when you start to feel what’s called a “wire edge,” which is just a little flange of metal that’s been raised off the very edge of the knife.
