It’s the mid-afternoon. Six hours from now, your dining room table will be bustling with friends waiting on your French onion soup for a dinner party. You’ve got ten pounds of onions to slice, and your knife just glanced off the first onion as you tried to chop through the stem. Don’t panic. In less than 15 minutes, you can get your blade back to a razor fine edge. That’s true whether you want to take the pro approach of using a whetstone, the absolute beginner route of a $12 pull-through sharpener the size of a computer mouse, or something in between. Even if you don’t have a Massive Slicing Event in the near future, you do need to keep your knives sharp in order to keep them safe (and enjoyable) to use. Just follow these tips for your method of choice to sharpen your blade like a pro (or at least like the confident home cook you are).
How do you want to sharpen?
Sharpening a knife is the process of removing steel from a blade, which creates a new edge. A whetstone, a large block of material that’s harder than a knife’s steel, is the tool most professional chefs use to keep their knives sharp. Whetstone sharpening can be tricky though, as it’s entirely up to the user to set the correct angle and keep it steady through repeated passes along the stone. And not all knives don’t come with the same blade angle. Western-style chefs’ knives have a wider 20º angle for chopping, while most Japanese-style knives have a less aggressive 15º angle that’s adept at slicing. If that 5º difference has you feeling anxiety about sharpening your own knives, have no fear. “It’s actually very hard to damage a knife beyond repair, so beginners shouldn’t worry too much about making mistakes,” says Vincent Lau, knife sharpening expert at Korin in New York. “Even if something goes wrong, a professional can usually fix it.”
Lau still recommends people try their hand at sharpening their knives with a whetstone, with an added caveat: “If you’re using an inexpensive knife that costs around $20–30, investing in a $50 whetstone may not make sense. In those cases, a pull-through sharpener can be a reasonable option.” He also notes that pull-through sharpeners and electric sharpeners can remove a lot more metal than a stone. The more metal a sharpener removes, the shorter the lifespan of your knife—over time, your wedge-shaped Chef’s knife can be whittled away to a needle-thin filet knife.
Below, I’ll get into how to use each of the three main types of knife sharpeners (pull-through, electric, and whetstones) in ways that’ll keep your knives safe and sharp. But first, what’s the deal with honing?
Honing Vs. Sharpening
Running your knife along a honing rod is important for knife maintenance, but it isn’t actually sharpening your blade. “Honing realigns the existing edge of the knife and does not remove any steel. It helps straighten an edge that has bent out of alignment through use,” says Lau. While microscopic evaluation might show that some steel is removed when you hone your knife, it’s not the significant amount you grind away when reshaping a knife’s edge. Most honing rods are either textured steel or ceramic, with the ceramic rods better at touching up knives made from harder steel (think: carbon steel Japanese blades). To properly hone your knife, follow these steps:
