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Kitchen Knife Maintenance

Knives are the most important tools in the kitchen. The rule for most kitchenware is to buy the best you can afford and then take care of it. Fine quality knives are completely functional and they do one thing extremely well – they cut. Their size, their shape, the way they feel in your hand, the way they are made, all evolved from centuries of trial, error, and old world craftsmanship combined with new knowledge and available materials. Fine knives are simple, heavy-duty and functional. The blade tapers evenly from the handle to tip, and from the back of the blade to the cutting edge. The tang, or portion of the blade where it connects to the handle, extends into the handle where it is either riveted or permanently bonded to the handle and the feel is hefty. These, together with the blade’s sharpness, add safety by reducing strain and fatigue. Fine quality knives have a sharp cutting edge that, with proper maintenance, stays sharp for a long time. The blade angle is consistent, they have optimal balance and most importantly, they feel good in your hand.

So, how do you best care for your knife? There are a couple of steps that this requires. The first step is keeping your knife clean. Certain food acids can stain even the most stainless of steels. It’s good practice to wipe a knife after every use. Lay the blade on a ?at surface, wipe one side, then the other with a soft, damp, soapy cloth, then rinse the blade under running water. This is safer than washing a knife in a sink where suds may hide the blade, or in a dishwasher where the edge can bang against other cutlery, silverware, or china. The dishwasher can also damage the handle of certain knives.

The next step is to sharpen your knife regularly. You know when the knife needs sharpening when the blade is dull. You start off with a knife that is blunt which means that the edge is worn. the goal is to make the sides of the edges meet each other and thus form a sharp cutting edge. You achieve this by lowering the edge bevels by grinding them with an abrasive such as a sharpening stone : The angle of the edge is still the same and the new edge is exactly in line with where the old one used to be. Now to accomplish this all you need is a decent stone, such as an 8" dual (coarse/medium) aluminium oxide stone, 6" (coarse/fine) Norton Carborundum Stone, 4" dual folding Ez-Lap diamond (coarse/fine), or a 4" DMT diafold (fine/super fine).

The basic method is to push your knife edge first along the stone like you were trying to slice into it. You need to exert a decent amount of force on the stone to get it to cut the blade so make sure it will not move. Either clamp it, put it on a non-skid surface, or just use a really heavy stone. The most important part is to maintain a constant angle between the blade and the stone. This becomes easy with practice. When you start out you can check that you are grinding at the correct angle by using a marker to color the edge and checking to see where you are removing metal by seeing where the he ink has been removed. After awhile you will be able to tell the angle is correct by feel.

So basically you stroke the knife on the stone, pushing the knife away from you. Then you turn the knife over and stroke it along the stone, pulling it towards you. The critical question of course is when do you stop doing this? How do you know when the knife is sharpened? One method is to let the edge of the blade rest on your thumbnail and move it in a scraping motion. If the blade is sharp then the edge will catch in and be difficult to move. You can also drag your finger across the edge of the blade to feel for a burr, the sharper a blade, the more pressure you will feel on your finger. A far less dangerous test is to just hold the knife edge up so a light source is shining right across. Now tilt the blade back and forth a little, if the edge is uneven or has any nicks or chips in it then this will reflect the light strongly and you know you still have some work to do.

If you are satisfied that the blade is sharp then there is only one small step left to do. You raise the angle of the blade off the stone just a few degrees, and give the knife just a couple of very light passes across the stone. This grinds just the very edge of the knife and insures that the edge is at its optimal strength and cutting ability. The reason that you do this is to insure that any burr is ground away. A burr is a small fold of weakened metal that can form during sharpening, it is only about 1/20 of a mm in width. To test to see that the burr has been removed you can use the thumbnail and finger feeling test as described in the above testing both sides of the blade.

 

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