How to Hand Sharpen a Wusthof Chef's Knife on a Whetstone

hey there folks welcome back ricky tran here with cutlery and more and today we are going to show you how to sharpen your wusthof on some wet stones now this is a very exciting process this is something that lots of people love and a lot of our subscribers have requested it so we're gonna go through some of the basics for our whitstones we are using the bob kramer by zwilling wet stones these are fantastic stones they come in a 400 1000 and 5000 kids stone with your base and a dressing or cleaning stone if you are not familiar with these stones these are very very good stones there are splash and goes so they require no soaking before using which is very handy for people who are on the go or just don't have that sort of time to wait around for 15 minutes or a half an hour for your stones to soak you can literally throw some water on them and they are ready to go so this is the 400 grit stone which we will start off with so what we are going to do now is consider sacrilege by many we are going to dull our knife so we are going to run it on the rod here on the honing rod when it comes to hand sharpening degrees can be very confusing and very intimidating here's one way to kind of forget about all that with hinge operating the most important thing is consistency not angles for the sake of this argument you can sharpen a knife at 18 degrees which is considered a very wide angle and get a better edge than a knife that is sharpened at 12 degrees if you hold a better consistent angle now here are two very basic methods you can use to actually find your sharpening angle the first is by actually just using your finger if you place your finger on the wet stone and you place the spine of the knife on your fingernail that will give you roughly anywhere between a 15 to 17 degree of a sharpening angle if you have slightly bigger hands then that might be a 17 degree angle or so again please focus on the fact that you are not worried about your angles and more worried about your consistency of your sharpening stroke on the other side of the knife i use my hand that i'm actually holding the knife with and i simply lean the spine onto my index finger and again that will give me roughly a 15 degree angle with my size hands if you want to go a little bit more in depth and find out what actual sharpening angle the knife actually has on it here is a method you can use you can put the knife on this whetstone and you can simply start dragging the knife toward you and what you want to do is you want to start leaning the knife the spine of the knife toward the stone and when you feel that the knife loses traction you back off just a hair and that will give you your sharpening angle or it will actually tell you exactly what angle the knife is actually sharpened at now you don't know what number that is but you definitely know that based on feel that is where that sharpen angle is now there are many methods as i have said before in sharpening there is the push and pull method which looks like this there is the crescent the back and forth crescent which looks more like this and then there's a single stroke method which is what i'm going to show you guys today and it's from heel to tip now the reason we're going with this method today is because it's the most easy to learn and also gives you a really consistent result which is really important for most people who are getting into wet stones in future videos we will cover the different sharpening methods with wet stones but today we'll stick with the very basic also another thing is when you hear about sharpening people always talk about the burr what is the bur so to quickly explain what a burr is essentially this is your knife's edge and a bur is a lip of material or a slight bit of material that folds over to one side or the other and you're always kind of detecting for the bur to figure out where that you know where your apex of your knife is if you can detect no burr it basically means that the apex of your knife is completely straight which gives you a very good edge and so with this method here you're not looking for a burr because you're going back and forth in between every stroke and so the burden never really gets a chance to develop what you're doing now is you're taking off just a bit of micro materials on each side of the cutting edge and so that by the time you have gone to the 5000 grit stone the edge is very very clean so this method here will help you bypass the whole bird talk so we are now ready to begin and all i'm gonna do is i'm gonna place the knife's heel onto the stone and i'm gonna find my angle which is right around here and we're gonna go from heel to tip in one smooth motion okay now if you want to get used to it you can go a few times say and you very gently place a knife onto the stone and you drag in one motion and the key is is you follow the arc of the knife the radius of the cutting edge will help you guide the knife and so you're not forcing your angles at all you're not forcing how to turn the knife you're allowing the knife to communicate with the stone and the knife will guide itself now the same thing on the other side i simply find the right angle that i'm going to sharpen at which for me is right where my spine hits my finger nail and i go in that direction now you may notice that i'm actually using my left hand and to put a finger on the other side or the other half of the knife what this does is it acts as a counterweight and so it allows a knife to be sharpened at a very consistent angle from heel to tip without the knife tilting at all so if you look really closely here if i use only one hand to actually sharpen this knife you'll see that the line that i'm drawing is not very clean it's not very smooth and it is not a perfect arc in line with the radius of the cutting edge it's a little off and so by having a counter weight what you do is you are balancing the knife out and allowing the knife to follow through in a very smooth transition from heel to tip now there is no magical number as to how many strokes you do you simply are trying to listen for the knife and listen how the knife is reacting on the stone and when you hear a very clean stroke from heel to tip you generally can stop there so i'm going to go 15 strokes on each side and see how we do [Music] [Music] yes okay so i'm not exactly sure if that was 15 strokes or not but it should be close so we're going to dry our knife off really quickly here so a really quick lesson on stone grit we have a 400 a 1 000 and a 5 000 what stone in this kit here so anything below a 1 000 grit stone is generally reserved for knives that are very dull if you have a knife that is fairly sharp you can simply hop on a 1000 grit stone and anything be between a 1 000 to 3 000 grit stone is considered a medium stone and anything above 3 000 is considered a fine stone and so this here is a 1000 grit stone if you're sharpening your knives very often such as once a week or even more frequently than that you simply can go to a 1000 grit stone and bypass the 400 stone in this case so we're going to load the stone surface with some water here and with this with this technique here we are not going to change anything up we are simply changing stones the technique of the single stroke will be exactly the same we don't change our angles we don't change our pressure we simply do the same thing and allow the stone to do the work for us okay here we go you can hear this stone here is much more quiet it's taking off less material uh okay so you may be wondering what is the stone that i have next to me what is a dressing stone well dressing stones are really a cleaning stone so when you see right here this is the 5000 grit stone and you see these little marks these are called load up and they don't really hinder the stone all that much but they sometimes can slow the stones cutting performance down so when that happens and you just want to make sure that you have a really clean stone you take your cleaning stone or your dressing stone and simply running run this in the stone up and down the wet stone and it pulls off excess material and so now we have a cleaner a cleaner edge to work with or a cleaner cutting surface to work with okay that's really it and these are typically soaking stones so i haven't soaked this one here so it seems a little dry but you soak them for just a few minutes before you actually use them but even without being soaked they do a pretty good job of removing load up off of the stones okay so now we are on the 5000 grit stone so in terms of strokes here it's the same thing there is no magical number you simply run the knife on the stone and just see how it sounds and see how it feels and also when you start seeing materials come off of the knife onto the stone that generally means that you are done okay so now what i'm going to do here i'm going to show you guys how this stone looks for now it's fairly clean okay and so you can see all the obvious black marks are gone or the gray marks are gone and so we're gonna run the knife on the stone a couple more times and show you okay so we see very light lines okay so now we're still seeing material because the stone will always pull off material but we're seeing less and less of it and so that generally tells me that the knife is ready and the edge does feel pretty good and so to test your edge i don't recommend you running your fingers up and down the knife you can run it sideways along the cutting edge but never run it with the knife and we are going to draw the knife off and do a really quick cut test here okay so we have some just basic magazine paper here and we'll do some cutting for you and show you how clean the edges at this point okay so very very clean and that was only just after a few minutes of sharpening and very easy to do this is an edge that can be used in any professional kitchen okay and all it took was really just a few minutes uh most of this video was me talking and walking you guys through the process but in terms of actual sharpening it was not anything more than maybe five minutes of actual sharpening so this method here is definitely a method that i recommend you trying out if you are getting into hand sharpening for the first time hand sharpening is a lot of fun a lot of folks love it because you get a very special connection with your knife and your wet stones the wealth of knowledge and information is vast out there so there is a huge community of people who love sharpening their knives with wet stones you also have me here with the team at cutlery and more to help you guys out through that process now we are doing video requests that's right so if you see any product at cutlerymore.com simply tell us what product you are looking at and then the information you are looking for and we will do our best to get a video up for you as soon as possible we'll have links to each of the products that were featured in today's video as well as a link to our website in the description below thank you for being with us today we'll catch you in the next video you

Channel: Cutlery and More

Views: 121,106

Keywords: cutleryandmore, cutlery and more, cutlery and more.com, how to sharpen chef knife, how to sharpen wusthof knife, how to sharpen wusthof chef knife, how to hand sharpen wusthof chef knife, sharpening wusthof chef knife by hand, sharpening knife on kramer glass whetstone, how to sharpen on bob kramer glass whetstone

Id: ZT0q2Da9jF4

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017