About Sharpening Your Knife
Any knives become dull gradually. Even a knife for hundreds of bucks, a knife made of very hard ceramics, edges are slightly reduced as you cut with the knife and become dull one day.
Different from other knives, however, Japanese knives skillfully handmade by artisans can recover its cutting ability almost up to its original state by sharpening.
When is The Time to Sharpen Your Knife?
Professional chefs sharpen their knives every day. They understand cutting ability of knives significantly affects taste of foods. They say, a well-cut knife brings out the raw ingredients to the maximum!
Having said that, handcrafted Japanese knives keep cutting ability for a long time. Unlike cheap mass-produced knives, Japanese knifes don’t need to sharpen often unless you like it.
The time we recommend you to sharpen your knife is when you feel unsmooth to cut tomatoes.
It’s time to take care of your knife!
When you can’t cut tomatoes in a single stroke, we recommend you to sharpen your knife as soon as you can. Sharpening can be done within 5 minutes if you do it frequently, but you may take an hour if you don’t do it for a long time and your knife become dull.
Professional chefs who sharpen knives everyday finishes up within a few minutes!
Take it easy! Sharpening is not difficult even for beginners.
Actually, there is no officially right way for the sharpening!
From ancient times, waterstones have been used for sharpening Japanese cutlery such as Samurai swords, knives and scissors.
In present, you may have used knife sharpener. However, sharpeners are completely different from waterstones.
Actually, sharpening by sharpeners impairs cutting edge of knives. Eventually, those knives will become unable to recover their cutting performance.
If you think you want to enjoy high cutting performance of your knife, then we highly recommend you to use waterstones.
Why You Should Use Waterstones, Not Sharpeners?
When you sharpen your knife, you need to shave edge of the knife and make it thin and sharp. In other words, you need to recover its cutting edge back somehow to its original shape.
Sharpeners DON’T sharpen cutting edges of the knives. Sharpeners scratch edges and make them jagged. Because knife’s edges become jaggy, it just seems to cut better.
However, jaggy edges made by sharpeners don’t last long. These jags are ground off soon as you cut foods. After all, edge of the knife become flat again but thick! Therefore, cutting edges become dull by using sharpener repeatedly.
It may be okay to use sharpeners for a couple of times. However, you need to sharpen by waterstones in order to make your knife’s cutting edge thin and sharp. Otherwise, edge of the knife changes its shape and unable to recover!
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