The Right Way To Sharpen Kitchen Knives

PEOPLE HAVE the wrong ideas about knives. A knife doesn’t cut like a razor or a plane iron on the push stroke. It’s somewhat like a saw with teeth that cuts in a sliding motion as it’s pushed or pulled. A properly sharpened knife is honed to a fine edge, yet has an appropriate roughness so that it has bite, or an ability to sink into the cut.

- Josh Donald

A knife doesn’t cut like a razor or a plane iron on the push stroke. It’s somewhat like a saw with teeth that cuts in a sliding motion as it’s pushed or pulled. A properly sharpened knife is honed to a fine edge, yet has an appropriate roughness so that it has bite, or an ability to sink into the cut.

Understanding the subtleties of sharpening is what we’re about at Bernal Cutlery, in the Mission District of San Francisco. We’ve sharpened thousands of knives. We also sell knives and teach people how to sharpen anything from a kitchen knife to a meat cleaver.

We’ve learnt there’s more to sharpening than a fine edge. Sharpening takes into account whether the knife is Japanese or Western, its material (stainless or carbon steel), and how the knife is used (slicing meat or fish, chopping vegetables, paring). The user’s preferences must be considered. We also think sharpening is fun, and one of the best parts of my job is talking to the amateur and professional knife users that we serve.

We sharpen all our knives by wet grinding, typically finishing by hand on Japanese water stones (see right). How fine we hone the knife depends on the knife and sometimes the user’s preferences. To sharpen a knife, you need a basic but comprehensive set of water stones. In the Japanese grit numbering system, coarse stones are 220 to 600 grit, medium stones are 800 to 1 200 grit, fine stones are 4 000 to 8 000 grit. These stones and a strop might cost as much as R1 000 to R2 500, but you’ll get many years of use out of them, and there are inexpensive alternatives (see “LowCost Sharpening”, on the next page).