Your knife needs to be sharpened, and for the sake of convenience—soup waits for no one! To be clear, honing is not the same thing as sharpening more on that in a bit , but honing a dull knife is better than nothing and will get you back to the broc faster than you can say whetstone.
Mounted on the handle is a rounded stick-like rod—typically made from steel, ceramic, or diamond-coated steel. Swish, swish, swish! View Iframe URL. See here for step-by-step directions on how to hone a dull blade. Eventually, though, that super-fine edge of metal will break off and wear away, like a pencil point dulling down. As this happens, the honing steel will become less and less helpful.
Your only good option then is to re-sharpen the knife, which rubs away metal on a whetstone to create a brand-new edge, just as a pencil sharpener puts a new point on a pencil. See here for instructions on how to sharpen a knife on a whetstone. You can hone a knife as often as you want. I do it any time I start to sense that the cutting power of a knife is fading, which can be as frequently as multiple times a day, given how much I cook.
Once you begin to notice that the honing isn't doing much, though, it's time to break out the whetstone or send the knife to a sharpener, if you don't want to do it yourself to give the knife a new edge.
For a professional cook, sharpening on a whetstone can be a daily or weekly ritual. For home cooks, even once every six months would do wonders for most of the kitchen knives out there.
No matter which type of steel you choose, keep it clean and free of any metal residue by wiping it with a damp towel from time to time. Unlike most of the other equipment we review here at Serious Eats, a honing steel is a difficult tool to assess objectively. Because a blade changes every time it's used, and because honing and sharpening also change the blade, it's incredibly hard to compare one steel with another and come away with a clear sense of which one worked best.
Still, I've been playing with a few examples of each of the three main types—stainless steel, ceramic, and diamond—by using them on a variety of my knives at home, which vary in dullness and metal type mostly stainless steel, along with a couple of carbon steel blades , then cutting vegetables to see how the honing had affected the knives' cutting ability. Here's the short version: I found very little obvious difference between one steel and another in terms of how well they honed the knives.
The diamond and ceramic steels had a slightly more noticeable effect, because those types actually remove some metal from the blade, but, as I'll explain below, that can be a mixed blessing. In judging ease of use, what I found to be more important than anything else was the build of the steel itself.
I found some handles more comfortable than others, and some steels more balanced and lighter than others. No matter which steel you buy, one of the most important criteria in my mind is its length. The longer a steel, the more runway you have to pull the knife along. This isn't a big deal with smaller knives, like paring knives, but it matters when you're steeling longer ones, like chef's knives and slicers. It's worth noting here that serrated knives can be honed only with great difficulty due to their teeth.
As a rule of thumb, I'd recommend a minimum length of 12 inches—that's the measure of the steel rod itself, not including the handle. With a inch steel, you'll be able to use the vertical honing method described in the above-linked article with little risk of the knife hitting the work surface below.
If you have huge knives, of more than 10 inches in blade length, then you may want to seek out an even longer steel. For that reason, whether you are a professional chef or a home cook, it is extremely important to maintain your kitchen knives always sharp. Not only is safer but it also allows you to perform easy and fast cuts with minimum effort required. This does not mean that after your knife start to lose its sharpness you should throw it away and get a new one.
Of course not. You can simply sharpen or hone your knives in a regular basis, and you can do that by using a sharpening steel. Being the preferred type of knife sharpeners among professional cooks and butchers, sharpening steels are indispensable accessories in every kitchen. Just as kitchen knives are essential for your cooking routine, a sharpening steel is essential to keep your knives always sharp and functional.
Therefore, given that there are many types of sharpening steels out there in the market, it is important that you know how to choose the right sharpening steel for your kitchen, and that is why we have prepared this page for you.
First of all, it is important to discuss what is the standard composition of a sharpening steel and what are its functions.
A typical sharpening steel is composed by a handle in most cases with an ergonomic design and rod that is usually made of steel. The handle serves you to hold the steel, and the rod is the area where you will pass the blade of your knife. In general, most sharpening steels do not actually sharpen your knives' blades.
What they actually do is to simply align the edge of the blade, and this a process known as honing and not sharpening. That is why in many cases, sharpening steels are more accurately called honing steels. The process of sharpening involves removing material from the edge to redefine its shape. To do this, it is more recommendable to use more abrasive types of sharpeners such as sharpening stones. Now that you know what is the function of a sharpening steel, we can now give you some tips on how to choose the right one for your kitchen.
It is true that buying a new sharpening steel might sometimes seem tricky because there are several characteristics to take into account.
However, to make your decision much easier, the team of MyChefKnives will explain you the 4 main features that you should take into consideration: the material of the rod, the shape of the rod, the size of the steel, and the hardness of your knife's blade.
The material of the rod. Regardless of its outside surface, the rod of a sharpening steel always has a metal core do not confuse with hardcore metal music.
This allows the rod to be solid and strong. In average, the hardness rating of a steel reaches 65 HRC in the Rockwell scale to guarantee at least a minimum level of abrasiveness. However, the level of abrasiveness of a steel will depend on the coating of the rod, for which there are 3 different types:.
This material is considerably harder than steel even the types of steel that reach up to 63 HRC hardness rating , thus it will not have any problem to redefine the edge of the blade and remove the microscopic metal fillings accumulated due to the usage of your knife. Although it is slightly less abrasive than diamond, ceramic rods are still a great option for dealing with blunt knives.
The shape of the rod. The material of the rod is not the only thing that can vary among different sharpening steels. The rods can also have different shapes, which are described below:. The contact surface is standard, thus the sharpening is simple. Its main advantage is that it is usually lighter in terms of weight when compared to other types of rod. The disadvanatge is that it is heavier than the rest.
I assigned one knife to each rod and started to hone. Then, since nobody slices up paper for dinner, I used the newly honed knives to slice tomatoes, knowing that sharp knives would glide through tough tomato skin, while dull ones would squash it, making oozing slices.
Next, I asked five testers with varying levels of honing experience to repeat my tests. Finally, I took the honing rods and the corresponding blades to a lab at MIT to examine them under a high-powered microscope. The results were revealing. Our testers gave higher performance scores to the rods whose knives sliced paper and tomatoes most smoothly and effortlessly.
Also, not all rods were equally easy to use. We examined hones and knives under a microscope at MIT. Another, more finely textured diamond-coated rod also roughed up our knives, but to a lesser extent. Both appeared to remove more metal from the blades than smoother rods, and we could see gray streaks when we wiped the blades on white dish towels. Under the microscope, these impressions were proven: The rod that felt roughest was covered with bigger, more irregular diamond grains, while the rod that felt finer-textured actually was.
While we like diamond-coated steel as the sharpening medium in our favorite electric and manual sharpeners, those tools have multiple sharpening slots that offer a progression of coarser-to-finer grit, ending with the gentlest finishing slot, but these diamond honing rods offered only one grit—a rough one.
Ridges provided good control and edge shaping while smooth surfaces polished blades. Diamond coatings ate away too much material. They were effective in restoring the knife edge with less scratching than diamond-coated rods. Under the microscope, we noticed that ridged rods differed in the number, proportion, and uniformity of their ridges. The ridges on one highly ranked model were more abundant, fine, and uniform than those on lower-ranked models with ridges. In the end, though, testers gave top marks to rods with smooth surfaces and rods with combinations of smooth plus lightly ridged textures, choosing them over the rods that were ridged all over.
Like fine-grit whetstones, smooth-surfaced rods restored sharpness and left our blades with polished edges. On rods with dual textures, we usually started with a few swipes on the textured sides and then turned the rods 90 degrees to use the smooth sides for finishing the edges. Contrary to conventional wisdom, even the smoothest rod still removes metal. We saw gray streaks—metal from the blades—all over our white ceramic rods.
The length of a rod also mattered. The rods minus handles ranged from 8 to 12 inches long, and most testers agreed that longer lengths made it easier to keep the knife angle consistent and to run the entire blades down the rods. Angle consistency is hard enough to achieve without obstacles. One of the shortest rods also tapered sharply at the tip, a feature that testers disliked; rods of more consistent thickness helped us make predictably consistent knife swipes.
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