Discover Cooking

Good cooking requires a sharp set of kitchen cutlery. Sharpen your knife on a honing steel before you use it. Honing removes small burrs and maintains the edge in between sharpening on a whetstone. Sharpen the hone of the blade — the flat part of the blade — by stroking it back and forth diagonally across the surface of the stone. Use slight pressure by carefully pressing down on the blade with your fingertips as you run the blade down the stone.

You might have heard that a costly knife will hold it’s edge longer. That’s not really true. Good steel does keep an edge better than the cheapest metal, but cutting any sturdy root vegetable will cause the edge to go out of true. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a mediocre knife or one that’s top of the line. To help fix this, use a honing steel as recommended above to straighten the edge on a daily basis.