How to sharpen cooking knives?

Factual Questions
1

My stir-fries are starting to suck, because my knives are dull. I have a big knife, a small knife and a cleaver. Can anyone advise on the best way to sharpen them up? I have a sharpening implement, but I am not sure that it is up to the job. It is a long, thin, cylindrical object that you hold in one hand whilst running the knife backwards and forwards along it.

My sharpening technique could also use some work. Is it OK to sharpen by moving the blade towards oneself? I recall hearing that it is better to sharpen away, but that would entail the cumbersome operation of swapping hands each time you wanted to work the opposite face of the blade.

Thanks in advance for any tips. :slight_smile:

2

I know that there is at least one other thread that deals with this subject. You might try a search first before rehashing the debate. :wink:

3

I’m not a chef, but a friend is. He told me that best practice is to sharpen a blade by moving the sharp edge down along and across the steel away from you then you reverse the blade and draw it back up with the blunt top edge towards your hand. The idea is that you don’t hurt yourself if you slip. But he does it so fast it’s almost a blur. It’s just like cutting something - you always try to cut away from yourself.

4

Not do a search before I posted in GQ!? The very thought…Well I admit that I was too lazy to read past the first page of search results, and missed this thread:

Link

Seems like the tool I have is called “sharpening steel”, and is just for touching up an edge, and will not do much for a dull blade? Guy who chefs, spill the beans.

5

You don’t rub the blade back and forth across the steel - the motion you’re striving for is to pretend you’re shaving thin strips off the steel, using the entire length of the blade, from butt to tip.

Sooner or later, no matter how good you are with a steel, a blade will need sharpening. As kitchen maven Alton Brown says, this is a job best left to the professionals. It’s extremely easy to wreck a knife if you don’t know how to sharpen.

The difference between using a steel and actual sharpening? The steel attempts to straighten out the sharp, but dinged-up edge. If you had a microscope, you’d see that the edge is actually bent or rolled to one side or another. If you rub your thumb across (not along - yow!) the blade, you can feel the “burr” or “wire edge” - after proper steeling, you won’t feel it. Sharpening grinds off metal and restores an edge that’s gone flat or rounded.

6

As gotpasswords says, a steel (even a “sharpening steel”) is really only good for straightening and touch-up. You can take your knife to a knife to a knifeshop for sharpening, but sadly, many knifeshops now use one of those blasted sharpening machines which use wheels to take microfine chunks out of the edge, making it seem sharp (sort of microserrated) but the edge won’t last very long. A properly sharpened blade needs to be finished by hand, with the edge polished (and with fine edges like a razor, stropped).

If they are good knives (and I’m assuming they aren’t serrated), my recommendation would be to go to purchase a stone. I use the DMT Dia-Sharp 10 inch stone (coarse and fine) to sharpen my knives up. It does take a little skill, although with an aligner kit you can control the angle pretty well. I find that they get in the way, though, especially on larger knives. Practice with a cheap knife first before trying to sharpen your good knives. Keeping knives sharp is not only important from a culinary standpoint but it is also a safety issue, and is something you should be able to do for yourself.

As for technique, try The Razor’s Edge Book of Sharpening or The Complete Book of Sharpening. The basics are to keep the angle constant, draw the knife edge-forward across the stone (and preferably away from you), and use as little (or no) lubricant as possible. (With a diamond stone none is needed.)

Stranger

7

I disagree. Any decent knife is extremely difficult to wreck by sharpening improperly. Sure, you can give yourself an entirely useless edge, but it’s not difficult to repair. You just start sharpening it again from scratch, this time the right way. Your knife won’t be quite as deep when you’re done, but that’s true of any sharpening.

8

I use the following: Link

I was skeptical about it’s effectiveness, but it works very well. I use to have to switch from the Chef’s knife to the bread knife to cut cleanly through tomato skin. 6 passes through this, and you have a very sharp edge.

9

:shudder: I hate these things.

It’s just taking chunks out of your edge, not properly sharpening it. Like I said before, it’s like creating microfine serrations. It’ll make it sharp in the short run but it’ll be difficult to keep it honed. A good set of stones and a couple minutes a month of regular touchup on the fine stone will give you a much better edge.

Stranger

10

I thought I would get a rise out of someone, Mr. “I was a professional cook”. :stuck_out_tongue:

I want to make the jump to doing it on a stone, but I’m afraid I have a sharpening… (not fetish, what is the word for a non-sexual facination). I already love running my fingers along the edge to sense how sharp it is. I probably would end up compulsively sharpening it to the point that it can cut a strand of hair dropped on it.

11

I disagree that you need someone else to do it, if you wan’t a cut-a-hair-in-midair type sharp blade, then you probably need some fairly specialised skills. But I wager with a half decent set of stones and half an hour, I could teach anybody to freehand sharpen their knives to at least factory sharpness.

The only real trick to get when sharpening with a stone is to keep a consistant angle as you move the knife along the stone. Sure, you can use a guide like this or this, but I’ve never seen the need for one.

Now, every source I’ve read says that you should sharpen away from the body, as if you were trying to shave a thin sliver off the stone. Personally, I always felt it was more intuitive to sharpen towards the body but I haven’t noticed much difference either way. Either way you do it, you wan’t to move it in one clean stroke from the base of the knife to the tip, keeping constant contact and pressure between the blade and the stone. German knives are recommended to be sharpened at 25 degrees, japanese knives as low as 15. The lower you go, the sharper your edge is but the quicker you lose it.

Now, my personal trick to keeping the edge stable is to have a bright light shining from above. The reflection of the light on the ceiling is an indicator of what angle the knife is at. Fold a piece of paper in half and half again and you have a 22.5 degree edge. Determine where the reflection is and note that point. When you sharpen, always try to keep the bright spot as near to that point as possible. Every time you sharpen, you get slightly better until you can tell by feel and then you can sharpen with your eyes closed if you have to.

Start on one side and keep sharpening until what’s called a burr is formed. This happens when the edge is ground down and meets the other side. It’s a tiny lip of metal which you should be able to feel with your finger. Once you achieve a burr over the entire length of your blade, then your ready to switch to the other side and sharpen again until you get a burr. Voila, a sharpened knife.

The first time you do it, it may take as long as 1/2 an hour since your creating an entirely new edge. Every time after that, It takes me about 5 minutes to get a burr after 1 - 3 month of regular use.

Maintain your edge using a steel. Ostensibly, you should do it every time before you use your knife but it’s a habit that you have to train into otherwise it becomes a major PITA.

This was an invaluable resource for me when I first started sharpening: eCGI. Read it as it goes into much more detail than I do.

12

Well, I don’t know about professional. I made a living (barely) at it, but it was just a placeholder before university or until I found my real calling as… an archeologist/adventurer/obtainer of rare antiquities. :smiley: Sadly, that never quite worked out, and now I’m some kind of engineer, though I’ll be damned if I can actually figure out what I’m supposed to be doing most days. :frowning:

BTW, in most kitchens where I’ve worked, the knives that were provided and most used were the soft plastic handled knives from Japan. Spyderco and Global used to make these for the commerical food service industry but I haven’t seen these in a while. Decent steel, cheap price, and when they got too dull to sharpen with a diamond steel they were just tossed. Some “chefs” brought personal knives (I got a nice partial set of Wusthof for cheap from one cook who was upgrading) but since kitchens are such a hotbed of thievery they had to keep a sharp eye on their blades, usually keeping them in a roll at their station.

Stranger