How to Sharpen a Knife with a Whetstone | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji uh i'm here in my backyard i'm with my buddy barney who is the uh the maker of con knives um and i'm gonna show you how to sharpen a hard knife today so um sharpening your knife with a your knife with a wet stone um i think it's the best way to sharpen a knife you know you can buy um manual sharpeners or electric sharpeners um i find that they don't give you the level of control and often they take too much material off the knife so you're going to end up winding you're going to wind up grinding your blade down much faster than you want to a good knife you know should last you well hopefully a lifetime it depends how often you use it of course but using stones i think is the is the best way to control exactly how much you're grinding off and also i think a good way to become more intimate with your knife which is i think an important thing um oh where did that stone fix here we go all right so um barney can you first of all um tell me about the so this is it's it's a hard steel right yeah so the high carbon steels are um they're gonna hold an edge for a long time um but they are a little bit more finicky like you're you're gonna have to take a little bit better care of them you can't just throw this in the dishwasher or something um but also like you said like i would not feed that to an electric sharpener because it's gonna just tear off extra metal so a um a standard uh western you know european style knife is usually made from a slightly softer steel and with a softer steel they're generally sort of easier to a little bit easier to sharpen um you can also hone them on a honing rod um to get to keep their edge going longer but they're also going to lose their edge a little bit faster whereas um japanese style knives or this is this is sort of a hybrid knife which is a you know a western shape with japanese style materials um with japanese steel um those knives are harder um so they can actually take a better edge and they will hold that edge longer um but they're a little bit more tricky to um to to sharpen properly um so stones come in different grits um these are all water stones um which means that you need to soak them in water before using them for lubrication they come in different grits um this one is 300 and this is what i would use if my knife is in really bad shape and i really need to start to grind a new edge down on it um i probably would never use this with a with a hard steel knife like this i would use this on my western knives um instead i'm going to start with this which is 800 8 and the higher the number the finer the grit this is eight hundred twelve hundred two thousand and then six thousand um i'll probably start with 800 just to show you and then and then from there we can move on up um when you're working with your knife you all you always want to keep your stone well lubricated so i find that getting a tray like this putting a towel in it and the stone down i find is the best way to do it and then the other thing you're going to need is this thing which is a stone fixer and what this does is it ensures that the top surface of the stone is nice and flat because if there's any sort of divots or dimples it's going to make it more difficult to evenly sharpen your knife so you basically just before you start sharpening flatten out your stone like that and you'll find that it also what it does is it it creates this sort of slurry of um of ground particles and that's actually what is going to be sharpening your knife um you don't want to wash that off you can just leave it um so this knife um these are these single or double bevel knives double bevel so um so the bevel on a knife um is basically the way the blade comes together so on a double bevel knife both sides are ground down to the same angle and come to a single point a single tapered point in the middle um on a single bevel knife usually it's around ninety percent ground on one side and ten percent uh on the other side um so on a double level knife um this is 15 degrees all right so um so the angle of a knife um so the the angle of the bevel on a western knife it's usually around 20 degrees um on a japanese style knife it's usually around 15 degrees sometimes 17 degrees um the easiest way to set the angle of your knife um first of all you can buy little things that will give you an angle but i find the easiest way is to just use some basic trigonometry so um if your knife you you can measure this distance in your knife or you can just use your eye and approximate it if you take that distance the the the width of your knife um and then divide it by four and lift up the back of the knife by that amount then you're basically at around 15 degrees um if you do the same thing and divided by three so it's a slightly higher angle you're at around 20 degrees um so um you know you can it's okay if you eyeball it um and the more you know the more experience you get at this the better you get it sort of eyeballing those angles but if you really want to be precise about it you can take you can do that you can do that math um i'm just going to eyeball it so i'm going at around 15 degrees right now and the way i sharpen my knives everybody has a slightly different method but the way i do it is that i start at one end of the stone the idea is i want to use the full length of the stone and go across the full length of the blade so i start with the heel at the top of the stone like this and i pull it slowly backwards trying to make sure that i maintain that angle the whole time actually let me it's a little bit closer over here so i use one hand on the blade to apply pressure all right sorry one hand and the handle to apply pressure and then the other one on the blade to keep that even and it really doesn't need a lot of pressure no not a lot of pressure and if you if you want to start on like a a crummy knife at first because you're worried about you know mangling up the sides of your knife like go ahead but at the same time just know that like your a well-loved knife is going to show it a little bit you're going to get scratches eventually um it just shows the love that you've gone on and used this knife a lot at the same time like this you know you said you can eyeball it you can also there's a little bit of a feeling once you've gotten some practice there's some feeling that you get to it that you'll start to be comfortable but yeah honestly the first time i sharpened a knife on a wet stone i i got so frustrated because it didn't get any sharper it probably got duller and then and then as i got more practice you know it felt more comfortable i got the i could feel the burr i could get anyway to where now i can get a razor sharp edge and it's it's a lot quicker too so um you see what i'm and you can see that sort of that that silty liquid kind of building up on the pooling up in the knife um that's fine that's that should be there and you should always make sure that your knife is always stays uh nice and moist your stone stays moist um now what i'm doing is i'm doing um i'm doing um when i when i pull the knife i apply a little bit more pressure than when i push it because what i don't want to accidentally happen is is for the knife to kind of dig into the stone because i can chip your stone and it can also chip your knife so when you're when i'm pushing forward i'm applying very very light pressure and a little bit more when i'm pulling back and what i do is i start on one side and i do about 16 strokes 16 to 20 strokes on that one side then i flip it over do about 16 to 20 strokes on that second side and then each time i flip it back over again i do fewer and fewer strokes so i'll start with 16 then i'll do eight then i'll do four two and then eventually i'll just be doing back and forth one one and one and that that's basically just ensure that you're kind of grinding down the blade evenly and you're not taking too much material off one side or causing that um you know the edge the very tip of the knife to roll over on itself or anything like that now you've got a lot of knives um how often do you sharpen your neck um if anyone's seen i mean you've all seen my knife drawer if you watch this channel um i have a lot of knives just sort of a i like to collect knives so you know my my the way i do it is like i'll i'll use one knife um until it gets dull to the point where it's annoying then i'll switch to another knife and i'll do that until i go through like my top five to ten favorite knives and then i'll just sharpen them all at once um so i end up sharpening my knives you know maybe a couple times a year max but just because i have so many you know when i was working yeah and you know with that with a hard steel knife i think i can't remember the last time i sharpened this one um oh maybe we should have showed how sharper was before we started oh well um i can't remember the last time i sharpened this one but it must be i mean it's been a long time and it's still you know with a really hard steel knife it's going to hold that edge for a long time you know as long as you don't abuse it um always cut on a cutting board um don't cut through bones with it don't cut through uh frozen foods yes and don't cut on glass um so so that's the basic process um i'm not sure there's too much more to show other than that you know i would so i would do the same thing i'm right now this is the 800 grit stone um and you want to work towards a finer and finer uh finer and finer grit so from here um i might you know i probably wouldn't do 812 under 2 000 6 000 i would probably just do something like um 8 000 to 2000 and i might even just finish with the 2000 um you know 6 000 or 8 000 grit is really um i would use that on my yanagi on my sashimi knife if i want to get like a real sort of mirror yeah polished mirror finish most people i'd say could do a lot of their work on a thousand grit stone um you could finish on 2000 or something i'm i don't have stones yet i'm gonna be making them but the the essential ones are hovering around below and above a thousand or so yeah i mean this this is 800 you know i can feel it it's already it's already sharp even at 800 you're going to get a very sharp edge on it and it is more it's it's probably less about the stone more about practice to get the right kind of technique and then once you're comfortable like it really doesn't take long just soaking the stone first and yeah you can put in awesome um so these stones they're made by a company called king all of my stones are from king it's just a company i've actually other than this one which i bought in japan but um they're all you know king is a good company you can find them online retails you can find them at any knife shop um they're a good solid company they also make double-sided stones i find that it's better to buy a single grit stone because they're usually larger and some of those double-sided inexpensive stones um i mean even these are only like 30 40 bucks a piece but the you know the double-sided really cheap ones that are small you know the smaller the stone the harder it's going to be to get an even grind on your knife the last thing to know about um hard steel knives is that you don't want to use a um a honing rod on them so with a western knife um what what can happen is that the the metal is soft so the edge can kind of roll over on itself a little bit and a honing rod you've seen chefs do that you know like you have the steel and you and you knock it back and knock the knife back and forth on it um that what that does is it sort of realigns the edge of the blade um with a very hard steel knife um it can actually sort of crack or chip the blade um so i mean i tell people if if if they're set on using a honing rod with one of my knives then it's like just don't put any pressure on it yeah you know because you really could do some damage to your knife more than it's gonna help you but yeah what i would actually recommend is a yeah as a if you're on a hard steel knife is a strop so this is something like this um you can you know you can find them like you know like the kind of barbers do with their um the leather strap that people use um this is just a block with a piece of leather attached and it comes with this sort of green putty and you basically just rub it on here um and then the exact same thing that you do um with the exact same thing that you do with the stone you just keep that same 15 degree angle with one exception you don't want to cut you don't want to go oh yeah yeah don't push don't push pulling yeah only pulling on a strap because you don't want to cut into your leather exactly so you're just pulling away from the from the uh yeah pulling pulling knife instead of pushing into the blade and that's going to give you that sort of final alignment and this is something that you know if you feel like your knife is starting to lose a little bit of its cutting power this should you know this will do this will do up up until the point where it really starts to get dull um a strap is going to um is going to suffice and help help help the knife retain that uh you know recapture that edge that it has speaking of dole like the there is an adage that says a dull knife is dangerous sharp is safe because you're not going to have to force your knife to do what it's supposed to do and that's exactly like that's why i want to introduce sharp and good knives to people is because like it's so much more fun to use the sharp knife first it is but it's also actually safer and you have to know that it's going to be sharp but like once you can sharpen it with the stone i don't know what we can cut here here let me pull a green tomato off my oh yeah i actually brought a bag of protestants oh you did oh yeah yeah yeah let's let's let's cut something and see let's see how sharp just stopped and got like so it's not so this is a this is like a you know a knife that i probably used for um at least half a year without sharpening i just sort of resharpened it on an 800 stone and we can see how sharp that is and then we can maybe we can test it against one of your brand new uh let me see how let me see how thin i can get this they actually have competitions of how sharp you can get your knife yeah pretty pretty sharp you can get it you know thin enough that you can see through the tomato can we try out that uh the brand new one here this is the this is the new version of the knife i didn't even uh check the blade on that so maybe let's drop it if you need it how'd that feel also quite sharp yeah yeah so a good knife you should be able to get paper thin tomato slices like that i'm gonna my sis my daughter just got a microscope so i'll uh i'll have her look at some tomato cells this evening all right um that's about it yeah when you know your knives don't store them loose in a drawer um i have a knife block that fits inside my drawer um um or you know at the very at the very least you should have a um an edge guard like a plastic sleeve or a leather sleeve that you stick on the knife so that it doesn't lose its edge banging around in a drawer um yeah all right so that is how you sharpen a knife um thank you thank you barney for being here um and for showing me your cool new knives um and yeah all right guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 217,198

Rating: 4.9236112 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ixCnCvDUKQ8

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mrohgeez]

I love that he's promoting learning knife maintenance to his casual home cook viewers. I kinda wish he focused more on describing deburring and cleaning up the apex instead of the counting strokes stuff.

[u/DropAdigit]

Kenji for president

[u/Sp99nHead]

Sharpening of the knife's tip looked a bit sloppy, otherwise an ok video for beginners