Question
Hilda P J
What’s the difference between sharpening and honing my chef’s knife? And when are each one done?
Answer
So usually in the culinary world, we use the word honing to refer to daily maintenance using a steel, or a variation of a steel. Where in the course of daily use of your knife, if this is sort of the front end sort of blade view, through use of the knife, the cutting edge starts to roll over and it becomes dull. And if we apply the knife to a steel, and steels come in different materials. They can be made of metal, they can be made of ceramic. Some of them are metal with a very fine sort of a diamond dust coating to help straighten up and restore the sharpness to the edge of the blade. And what that does is when the steel is applied to this edge that's rolled over, it actually straightens it back up, and it'll restore the cutting edge. And so we do that on a daily basis. That's the recommendation. And if you're doing a lot of work, you might even do it multiple times a day. We see that in professional kitchens. But typically at home, once a day is going to be adequate. Now, over time, with longer term use, the knife actually starts to wear down. And even the daily honing is not enough to restore the sharpness. And this is when we actually have to sharpen the blade. And this is when the term sharpening is used. And so your options for sharpening are several. And one is to use a small machine that is electric. It's got some wheels that might spin, and you'll pull the knife through these two wheels. And at the same time, it'll sort of grind down the cutting edge to restore some sharpness to the blade. Another option is to use a similar design, but in a manual format. So there's nothing to plug in. It's just a smaller, simpler device, again, with a couple of wheels that you draw the blade through, and this will take off a little bit of metal from the edge of the knife, and restore some of the sharpness. And then from there, if you were to take your knife to a sharpener, typically, they're going to use a very fast-spinning wheel with some sort of an abrasive on that grinding edge. And they're going to run your blade back and forth, and they'll flip it over and then run the other cutting edge back and forth across their fast-spinning abrasive wheel, to bring a sharpness, a fresh cutting edge to that blade. A word of caution here, and I've seen this a handful of times with our own students. You want to ask around to find a truly competent ... professional sharpener. And what I've seen is the results of someone who ground down the blade too much. And what this professional sharpener did was actually grind down the blade, probably equivalent, and I'm not exaggerating here, probably equivalent to 50 years of normal use. And the knife wasn't trashed, but it needed some help, and it was quite worn. So please do ask around to find a competent professional sharpener. Then the other option is to sort of develop your own skills using a whetstone. And a whetstone is very often used in either two or three stages in terms of coarseness of the stone. And we most commonly use the medium and the fine stone when it comes to this sort of routine sharpening, maybe once or twice a year for the home cook is usually adequate. There's a learning curve, though, okay? And if you want to go down that path, I always suggest that you practice with, I'll say a practice-worthy knife. So not your expensive knife, not one that you really want to take care of and use for the next 50 years, but just a less expensive knife. And if it means running down to a Goodwill or some sort of a secondhand store and picking up a used knife for a couple of bucks that you can practice on, do that to get the rhythm and the angle and kind of that muscle memory that's involved in your hands and your shoulders in order to get that sharpening done consistently with good results, and then apply that to your good knife. Otherwise, you risk really wearing down your knife and never having a sharp knife. And it's akin to the previous example of that professional who did that on a spinning wheel, except you do it at a much slower pace because you're just going back and forth with your hands like this, rather than working on a wheel at a few thousand RPM. So there's a learning curve. The results arguably can be the best results, but it'll take some time to get there.
