When and How to sharpen your chef knife    

When and How to Sharpen Your Knife
When should you sharpen your chef knife?
Which tool should you use? A honing steel (Sharpening rod)? A Whetstone? A ceramic sharpening rod?

There are clear answers to these questions, and depending on what kind of chef knife you use you will get your explanation here.
 

There are two main knife blades that are used for chef knives:
A forged blade and a stamped blade.
 

The time to sharpen your chef knife depends on the quality of the blade on the knife.
You should sharpen your knife when it is not slicing as easily as it was when you first bought it.

Don’t worry about ruining your knife. If you sharpen it correctly, you cannot ruin a good blade. If it is a cheap knife it doesn’t really matter when and how you sharpen it, you will never get it to slice like it did when you first bought it.
 

First of all some general knowledge:

The edge of the blade in a knife is never really straight. If you look at it closely under a magnifying apparatus you will see that there are grooves and teeth in every knife’s edge.
 

When you use the knife, in time these teeth will curve to the sides. This is what makes the knife less sharp.
This happens whether you use a stamped blade chef knife or a forged chef knife.
 

In both cases after a while the ridges on the edge of the blade will curve to the sides and make your knife blunt.

In good quality blades (usually forged ones) with good metals like VG-10 steel, this will take a longer time to happen depending on the amount of use of your knife.
In stamped blades this happens faster and in cheap blades this can happen even after the first time you use your knife.
 

The difference in forged blades is that the cutting edge of the blade is a different metal than the blade itself, much tougher and durable, and it is formed in the middle of the blade while the rest of the blade covers it and makes this chef knife flexible and extremely durable at the same time.
In stamped knives, it is the same stainless steel throughout the whole blade.
 

So there are two options for sharpening your chef knife:
 

1. For forged blades:
You should use a Sharpening rod (preferably ceramic) every couple of weeks, or even every 4 – 6 weeks depending on the quality of the blade.
Use a whetstone every 3 – 6 months again depending on the quality of the blade.
In forged blades the whetstone is used to expose the core cutting metal after several uses of the sharpening rod (like sharpening a pencil when the tip breaks).
 

2. For stamped chef knife blades use the sharpening rod mostly, again depending on the quality of the blade. When using stamped blades it can be after every use because they tend to go blunt much faster, and use a whetstone when the sharpening rod doesn’t do the job anymore.
And then you use the whetstone to form a new edge to the blade.

For information on how to use sharpening rods and whetstone you can read the series of 3 articles which explain exactly how to sharpen your chef knife correctly.
 

Chef knife sharpening part I



 

 For more information go to the Sakura Order Page

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I am the head chef at Barbie's Bar-B-Q in Timmins, Ontario. Got this knife for my kitchen at home. After using it for a while, I bought one for each of my sues-chefs at the restaurant. They are very happy. Great knife. Very recommended. Richie Mann Canada

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