Honing Steel: How to keep your knives razor-sharp?
Hi dear readers, I’m Jurgen from Green Elephant Kitchen.
// Not a professional writer, hopefully this piece is readable :) //
At this moment I don’t know how advanced are you in the field of knife sharpening. Most likely some of you are seasoned chefs, home cooks or knife enthusiasts who already have all the supplies starting from different kind of sharpening stones all the way to leather strops for putting the mirror finish on your knife’s edge. On the other hand, probably a few of you are not that advanced yet — perhaps you just made an investment in your first high quality kitchen knife and are looking for an easy way to keep it sharp yourself at home while not messing up the nice factory edge it came with.
Be in whichever stage of your “sharpening journey”, I truly believe that every home should have a ceramic honing steel to maintain your knives sharp (I might be just a little bit biased here). It’s not only me, if you follow the advice of seasoned chefs, I’m more than confident you’ll get the same response regarding the ceramic rod.
Why Honing steel? What does it do?
When you unbox your new knife you just spent a small fortune on, you’ll see the perfect razor-sharp edge on it and it cuts through everything like a butter — this is how you’d like your knife to be at all times. However, the more you use your knife, everyday normal wear and tear will bend the edge a bit and it will feel as the knife is not that sharp anymore. Now, this is the time to take the honing steel from the drawer and slide your knife 5–10 times on each side along the rod. By doing this, you will realign the bent/curved edge to it’s original form and your knife is sharp again.
Once you’ve done this, then you’ll see some gray stripes on your ceramic rod — these are small particles of metal shaved from your knife. What that means, is that it also sharpens your knife, not only realigns the current edge. Why is that good, you might ask? If you bend the metal back and forth many times (just realigning to the centre), the bending point will get more fragile and prone to chip. By shaving off small amounts of metal, you’re actually preventing your knife’s edge to become that fragile in the first place.
By using honing steel, you’ll keep your knife in a great shape between the “real” sharpening sessions which should happen once or twice in every 2 years, depending on how much you use your knives.
There are, of course, a proper technique on how to use honing steel for different types of knives, for example German knives should be honed with wider angle than Japanese, etc. If this is something you’re interested in learning more check out this comprehensive honing steel guide on our website to get the technique just right.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Jurgen from Green Elephant Kitchen
