If you aren’t sending your professional knives out to be sharpened, what is your best option for keeping your edges sharp? There are a variety of knife sharpeners on the market or you may be using a sharpening steel.
In the foodservice environment, most cooks are using their same few professional knives every day to do their food prep. A good sharp knife is a foodservice kitchen essential. Tasks like chopping herbs, slicing meats, fruits or vegetables, filleting a fish and more. Sharp knives are not only necessary for getting the task done, but also for accomplishing these tasks safely. Dull knives are the source of many very serious kitchen accidents. That’s why having a quality knife sharpener or steel and knowing how to use it is important.
One common question for new comers to the kitchen, is how often should knives be sharpened? Depending on usage, every three months is a good starting point. Sharp knives improve safety, but you can over sharpen knives, even those with high quality blades. The sharpening process removes material from the blade and this can shorten the lifespan if done too frequently. If you feel a blade is not up to par, but it has been recently sharpened, you can hone your knives more frequently. Honing realigns the knife blade but does not technically sharpen it. As far as sharpeners go, there are manual sharpeners or electric sharpeners and sharpening steels.
Electric sharpeners are both simple and convenient to use. One major benefit of an electric sharpener is that you don’t need to use any force when sharpening your knives, you simply pull the blade through and the sharpener does the work for you. With a manual sharpener, like the FSE Dual Action Knife Sharpener, insert your blade into the coarse setting and pull the knife toward you from the handle end to the tip. As you do this, you’ll feel some resistance on the blade and you should hear a grinding noise as the edge is being sharpened. After the coarse setting, you will need to utilize the fine setting to fine tune the blade. Depending on the sharpener you are using, you may have a two step or three step sharpener which means one or two fine settings. Remember to pull the blade through each slot (two or three) the same amount of times. There are also hand held manual sharpeners, like the FMP Accusharp Knife Sharpener, which allow you to easily sharpen even blunt knife blades with precision.
Sharpening steels will re-align a knife’s edge and are ideal for regular maintenance of your professional knives. Using a sharpening steel is easy once you know how to properly use a sharpening steel and is the preferred method by some chef’s who want to extend the longevity of their knife blades because they have more control with a sharpening steel and provide a razor sharp edge when the process is complete.
