Anyone with a knack for cooking must know the value of a sharp chef’s knife. So, How Often Do You Sharpen A Chef Knife in order to experience the joy of cooking? And the perfectly sliced, diced ingredients are an additional perk!
So, How Often Do You Sharpen A Chef Knife? For those who use their chef’s knives on the regular, you can sharpen your knives after every 3 to 4 uses. You can get it professionally cleaned and sharpened one to two times a year. And for those who rarely use their knives or don’t use them at all, it is recommended that you sharpen them at least twice a year. This will make your knives last for a longer period of time and in better conditions and will also prevent the blades from becoming dull which is more dangerous to work with.
The most common way to sharpen your knives is by using a whetstone or a diamond rod. This helps maintain the quality of the knife and make sure it doesn’t do any harm to the knife. By using this equipment you can avoid lessening the lifespan of the knife.
Table of Contents
How To Sharpen a Chef’s Knife
Here are the steps to sharpen your chef’s knife
- Set your Knife down on the countertop with its handle facing away from you. Place something underneath the Chef’s Knife so that the blade is out of contact with anything, even just slightly.
- Now pick up your Chef’s Knife sharpener in your hand, making sure that you are using either a whetstone or a diamond rod for this task. These types of sharpeners are designed to be used on Chef Knives, so they are the best ones for this job. And by using the wrong type of sharpener for your knives, you will end up ruining them and making them even duller than they were, to begin with.
- With your Knife sharpener firmly in one hand, you should hold down the Chef’s Knife by the handle with your other hand at a 15-degree angle from perpendicular to the blade. Make sure that if you were looking straight down at the Knife, it would make an upside-down ‘V’ shape (if not, try again).
- Now drag your Knife sharpener across the Knife’s edge in smooth strokes 5 – 10 times. You will want to drag it evenly across all sides of the blade without digging too deeply into any part of it. If you find that you can’t get a smooth and even edge, try to lift up your knife sharpener every three strokes so that the edge of the Knife doesn’t have any deep gouges or nicks in it.
- Once you are done with this process, you should flip over the Knife to examine the other side. If there are still deep gouges or nicks in the blade, go back over it for another minute using the same technique. Then again check both sides.
- If both sides of your Knife are even and smooth without any deeper gouges or nicks, then congratulations! Your Chef’s Knife is now ready to use.
A Guide To Sharpening Your Chef’s Knife
Should You Push Or Pull While Sharpening A Knife
Chefs can sharpen their knives in many different ways. They may use Chef’s Knife Sharpeners to keep their knives in tip-top shape for professional and home use.
When Chefs Push their Knives, they will press down on the Knife Sharpener with firm force, bringing the edge of the blade against an abrasive surface until it meets a metal stop. Make sure that as much steel as possible is ground away from the blade. Chefs should keep their blades perpendicular to surfaces at all times. They should also be sure to keep Chef Knives, Knife Sharpeners, and Chef’s hands and fingers well out of the way so as not to cause injury should a slip occur.
Chefs can also choose to pull their Knives instead of pushing them when sharpening their Chef’s Knives. This process involves placing the Chef Knife Sharpeners beneath the blade itself, with its abrasive surface facing towards one end of the blade (this is called drawing the knife) and then pulling it back along this surface until it reaches the other end. Again, chefs should make sure that they hold Knife Sharpeners and Chef’s other hand well away from the edge of the blade and be careful not to nick their fingers in the process.
How Can You Know If Your Knife Is Sharp
Chef knives are used in the kitchen for chopping and slicing food, such as meats and vegetables. Many people who enjoy cooking want to own several knives so that they have the right one for each task: paring knives, utility knives, serrated steak knives, fillet knives, and chef’s knives just to name a few. Chef’s knives are often the most versatile kitchen knife available.
They can be very expensive pieces of equipment, which means that they should last a long time with proper care. Cooks who use chef’s knives every day to prepare their food quickly learn that it is important to keep their knives sharpened. A sharp blade enables cooks to slice or dice through foods with ease – without exerting a lot of effort.
Using a dull chef’s knife makes chopping foods more difficult; when you try to cut tough vegetables like carrots or celery with a dull blade, it causes the food to shift around and move instead of allowing your knife to slice through smoothly and quickly without any effort. If you have ever tried using a very dull chef knife, you know how difficult it can be to cut vegetables evenly and thinly because your knife keeps sticking on the food instead of easily slicing through it. You may also find yourself forcing down harder on your knife to help push through the tough vegetable, which can cause injuries.
When you see a shiny metal strip on the cutting edge, that’s your cue. That shiny metal strip is where it came from the factory, and now it has been ground away from repeated use. Your kitchen knives will go dull with time as well as rusting due to their exposure to corrosive elements in food and air after each use.
To keep them at their top-notch of usability at all times, you must maintain them for continued sharpness.
You can test your edge by slicing through an index card held horizontally with your eyes closed. If you feel the edge tear instead of cut, then it’s time to take your blades in for professional service. There are several ways that you can do it at home however since you probably won’t want to send your prized knives to a professional for sharpening every time you need them.
Is It Possible To Ruin A Knife By Sharpening It
No, you cannot ruin a knife by sharpening it.
The reason for this is that by sharpening the blade you are only removing the outer layer of steel from it, and there will be nothing that can harm you in doing so unless you use a grinder with an extremely coarse wheel. The best way to think about this is to look at a piece of paper, what would happen if you cut through layers of paper with a pair of scissors?
The answer is simple: it would make them shorter but still perfectly functional. It’s exactly the same thing with knives, once all they have been ground down to is their core metal most blades will be useless as they will lack structural integrity. However, if the metal has simply been thinned and is still functional then there is no danger to you, it can’t suddenly snap on you or anything like that.
The only time that you might ruin a knife by sharpening it would be if it was so blunt as to require coarse grinding stones, but this will almost certainly be apparent as such knives do not easily slice through materials. Sharpening these knives may result in the blade snapping as they simply cannot hold their shape when so thin! This is why it is recommended to use diamond sharpener accessories: they work on just about every kind of blade and ensure that even if your knife has gone extremely blunt, it will still recover its former glory without having any need for Coarse Grinding Stones.
Things To Know Before You Learn How Often Do You Sharpen A Chef Knife
Do Chefs Sharpen Their Knives
Chefs have a love-hate relationship with their Chef’s knife. They hate having to keep it sharp, but they can’t live without it! Chef’s use a Chef knife for just about everything – chopping vegetables, slicing meats and the list goes on. Keeping your Chef knife at its best is essential to being a great chef! Chef knives are extremely valuable, intricate pieces of equipment to chefs. They can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars or more per knife. Thus, most chefs take care of their precious utensils and make sure they remain as sharp as possible.
In fact, many chefs even go the extra mile and sharpen their own knives!
Chef knives require maintenance in order to keep them sharp. They need to be cleaned properly, dried correctly, and stored with ease. Sharpening a chef knife is simple enough – but you still have to know how often it needs to be done by a professional. Even if the knives are not much in use, they need to be sharpened at least one to two times a year. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case for every chef, although it can be done for keeping the knives in better conditions for longer periods of time.
What Is Used By A Chef To Sharpen Their Chef’s Knife
The answer: whetstones. There are two types of whetstones that most Chefs use; one type is the natural stone that comes in many different shapes and sizes. The other type is an artificial stone which you can get in flat or round forms for easy handling.
Before even touching the knife to the Chef’s choice of whetstones, they do a couple of things…
To get the Chef’s knife ready for sharpening, Chefs will first make sure that their knife is absolutely spotless. They will clean off the blade by wiping it down with an old rag or towel. They also make sure to take any removable parts off of the knife (like screws) out, because they could be lost while you sharpen it.
Once everything is in order and all other knives are put away, Chef then selects their whetstones. If they want an even edge on their knife they would use two whetstones; one shorter stone or “Waterstone” with medium coarseness and one longer stone or “oil stone”. They will use the coarser Waterstone first and then finish off with the finer oilstone. They can also choose to go on their knife without finishing with an oilstone, this method is called ‘freehand sharpening’ and is mostly used for Asian Chef’s Knives.
To sharpen, Chefs lay their knife flat against the whetstones in a smooth arc pattern. They keep their thumb pressed lightly against the back of the knife blade to ensure that they are applying even pressure across the whole blade.
Chefs repeat this motion along with all parts of both whetstones until either there are no nicks left on the knife or they aren’t satisfied with the edge. They then wipe the blade again before putting it away to be used.
