Knife Sharpening at its Simplest

look you're probably gonna spend hundreds of hours in the kitchen every single year why do we make it easier with one of these i've always had the philosophy that instead of spending ten dollars every single year on a knife you're better off just getting a really nice one that you can use for many years to come as long as you maintain it and i want to cover these japanese knives japanese knives are amazing because they're incredibly sharp they're very lightweight compared to german knives and they're just a joy to use it's also important to have a sharp knife because if you go to cut your food and your knife slips because it wasn't sharp enough to cut through it you could nick a finger hurt yourself but even if you spend all this money on an expensive knife this can still happen it has completely lost its edge regardless of how much you spend on a knife you still need to sharpen it you need to make sure you're keeping the edge over time so i'm going to show you how to do that now knife maintenance always begins with the whetstone on the right we have a 6000 grit polishing stone which is great for day-to-day maintenance but if your knife is in worst condition they need to be you can start with a 1 500 grit stone instead the first step is always to soak your stones you want to let these sit around 10 to 15 minutes and this is how they're going to absorb all the water and let your knife smoothly glide over while they're soaking there's a couple of things i want to mention first there's different kinds of whetstones there's ones that you can actually pre-soak and the other ones that use splash and go i've generally had much better results with the pre-soaking ones you can also find whetstones that are double-sided where you have two different grit levels on each side those work perfectly fine too the knife that we'll be sharpening today is my most used knife the japanese knockery and is essentially a vegetable knife but after cutting a bunch of squashes these past couple of weeks the edge is really worn down so it's time to give it a polish go ahead and attach one of your polishing stones to a stand and make sure it's really locked in place because if it slips you could either damage your knife or hurt yourself by accident the trick is now as you're polishing make sure you always keep the surface wet because you don't want the metal on your knife to be rubbing against the raw stone we're finally ready to sharpen our knife and there are only two things we need to be thinking about using the hand on the handle to control the angle and the hand on the blade to control the pressure first the angle depends on the slant on the edge of your blade but i've had great success by just resting the back of the blade on the thumb that's actually holding the blade another option is you can purchase a blade guide that snaps onto your knife and practice with this first to get a better intuition for it make sure to keep rehydrating the surface of your whetstone and basically the technique i use now is i'm going to pick different sections of the knife and just go back and forth using an even amount of pressure it's also important to note that we only want to apply pressure when the knife is being pulled towards you but when we're pushing it away don't apply any pressure it's better to do more strokes with lighter pressure than to grind off too much of the metal at the beginning once you've done every section on the edge of your knife turn it around and do the exact same thing on the other side again section by section grind the edge of your knife until you've covered the entire length once it starts to feel smooth you can now stop we're going to end up polishing this anyway with the finer grit stone in just a bit what we're going to do now is instead of going back and forth we're going to do the set of bias we've essentially sharpened each individual section of the knife on its own but we want to blend it all together so it's one even cut now that we've completed our sharpening with the coarse stone we will just rinse and repeat for the smoother stone because the stone removes a lot less metal from the blade i would recommend doing additional strokes to smooth out any imperfections and again continuously wet the top of the stone to allow for the cleanest grinds go ahead and run your finger along the edge of the blade and you should be able to feel the bur which means you should be good to go if it still doesn't feel very smooth to you just do a couple more passes [Music] there's two main tests that i like to do after i've sharpened my knife to make sure that it's adequate first is the herb test herbs need to be cut with an extremely sharp knife because the more you have to cut it the more you'll rupture the cells inside and all the flavor will leak out onto the board we'll be cutting some rosemary here quickly just to make sure that it cuts through everything properly and as we can see there's absolutely no green on the board which means it cut through perfectly second is a popular paper test and what we want to do here is make sure that as we're cutting through the paper checking the edge across the entire length the only thing left is knife storage whenever you clean your knives or you're done using them you want to put some camellia oil on them which protects them from rust lastly you want to have a size sheet so you can protect the edge during storage and transport but that's it we got our 20 to 30 minute maintenance which only happens once a month to get our dull knife back to new

Channel: PriyamTheCook

Views: 40,641

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Id: ihskL-Nl_Ao

Length: 4min 55sec (295 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022