Equipment Review: Honing Rods

[Music] if you're like most people you probably have a honing rod or sharpening steel somewhere with your knives it's supposed to keep your knife sharp but do you use it because true confession until i did this testing i never did i was always a little skeptical i've sat at holiday tables watching people putting on a show before carving the roast they're slashing the knife and the hone in the air back and forth it sure looks impressive but i've always sort of secretly wondered how does that sharpen a knife so i bought nine honing rods all different kinds one's called sharpening steels and one's called honing rods now some people say these are two different things but they looked really similar so i got both the homes themselves are 8 to 12 inches long four were made of steel three ceramic and two were diamond coated steel their surfaces vary too because some are completely smooth some are covered with ridges and some have a combination of textures to test them i bought nine new copies of our favorite chef's knife and i headed into the kitchen now since i'd never used a honing rod first i practiced on an older knife the test kitchen's preferred technique is to plant the tip of the rod on a cutting board on a damp folded dish towel and then you hold it straight and slide the knife from heel to tip down each side of the rod at about a 15 degree angle you want to maintain light consistent pressure now while you could hone in the air like my holiday host that's not ideal because with two moving pieces it's harder to keep a consistent angle which you really want to do as much as possible i'm happy to report that honing is not scary or difficult you can get a feel for it after just a few minutes of practice next i dulled the cutting edges of those brand new knives on a hard glass cutting board i chopped until the blade couldn't cut smoothly through paper glass is a horrible cutting surface and this really sped up the typical effects of much longer use i assigned one knife to each rod and i started to hone now before honing and again after every few swipes i tried to slice the paper again to help me gauge whether the hones were really improving the knife's edges then since nobody really slices up paper for dinner i also slice tomatoes now you can see and feel the difference right away i also asked five testers with varying levels of honing experience to repeat my tests and finally i took the hones and their knives to a lab at mit to look at them under a high-powered microscope now the results were pretty revealing first i'm no longer a skeptic these things really work all of the rods very quickly improve the cutting edges of the knives usually within a half a dozen swipes and not all rods were equally easy to use length helped they ranged from 8 to 12 inches and longer lengths made it easier for us to keep the knife angle consistent and run the entire blade across the rod wider hones worked better and so did hones that stayed the same thickness from top to bottom rather than tapering sharply those factors all helped us control the movement of the knife now handles mattered but not their material their shape we preferred handles that didn't flare out too broadly right over the home that's a safety feature that's only relevant if you're honing in the air for our method it just gets in the way it's really important to try to swipe the blade at a consistent narrow angle and you want to keep it the same on both sides of the rod and this is much easier to do when there's nothing in the way now some honing rods also had tips that are pointed or rubbery and that's supposedly helping it stay planted on the cutting board those often failed and while we were working they let the rod slide around we recommend placing the tip on a folded damp dish towel and that gives you extra security the texture of the rods mattered some hones were rough others were very smooth now this one it's the roughest diamond coated rod it made this hideous scraping sound on your knife another diamond coated rod had a finer texture and it also seemed to scrape the knives but to a lesser extent both of these appear to remove more metal from the blades than smoother rods and we really worried that if we got the angle wrong we'd mess up our knives this is what made us decide to rate the hones not only on how well the knives sliced but also on their condition afterward we do like diamond coated steel as a sharpening medium in our favorite electric and manual sharpeners but those tools have multiple sharpening slots they offer a progression of coarser to finer grit and they end with the gentlest finishing slot these diamond toning rods offered only one grit a rough one now moderately textured hones we found some were covered with ridges from handle to tip and these hit a middle ground they appealed to some testers because they had some grippiness that helped us control the angle and speed while we were swiping the knives along them they scratched less than the diamond coated rods but under the microscope we saw that these homes really differed in the number and the placement of their bridges and that affected their performance our favorite had more and more uniform ridges than lower rated models but in the end we gave top marks to the smoothest rods these were either smooth all over or they had a combination of smooth and lightly ridged textures they gently restored sharpness while leaving our knives with a polished edge now on rods with dual textures we usually started with a few swipes on the textured sides and then turned the rod 90 degrees to finish using the smooth sides one big lesson we learned through testing all these different so-called honing rods and sharpening steels most of them are mislabeled what happens when you're cutting food is that the knife edge get bent over or even smushed honing pushes that bent over knife edge back to center so it's shaped like a v again sharpening removes metal and re-grinds the edge our lineups performance did not match their names so my advice is ignore names and focus on texture rough surfaces act like sharpeners and any flaw in your technique is going to rough up your knife smoother more finely textured rods like our favorites act like hones and they realign and lightly sharpen the blade without damage so you're back in business so after many hours of dulling and honing knives we found our favorite the bob cramer double cut sharpening steel now this thing was easy to maintain a consistent knife angle because it was one of the longest and widest tones in our lineup it has a combination texture two finely textured two smooth surfaces so it gave us two stages for restoring the blade edge it touched up the blades without damaging them and it surprised us by how fast and well it worked now since it cost about 50 dollars we also chose a best buy which is the 12 inch idaho fine ceramic sharpening rod it was about 35 like the creamer this rod is also 12 inches long and it's comfortable to use it's got a smooth white ceramic surface and it was comparatively gentle while still effectively touching up the knife's edge now whichever one you choose here's our advice on when to use a hone try it whenever your knife seems to lose its feeling of sharpness nine times out of ten that's all you need if it doesn't improve it's time to use the sharpener [Music] you

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 238,305

Keywords: honing rod, sharpening honing rod, knife sharpeners, how to sharpen a knife, honing steel, sharpening, sharpening rod, kitchen tools, kitchen equipment, knives, kitchen knife, equipment review

Id: KCh4iKDYAC0

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019