Just like maintaining a healthy lifestyle, maintenance and habit is key. Maintaining your knives is an important part of ensuring your knives stay sharp and perform their best. Regular maintenance and sharpening can help extend the life of your knives, save you money by preventing the need to buy new knives, and maintain safety during cooking.
One way to maintain a knife is to use a honing rod on a regular basis, often knives that are freshly sharpened can become dull after only a couple uses. This is due to the fact that edge of a knife will have microscopic teeth or burr on the edge of the knife that can’t bee seen by the naked eye. Often when cutting this micro burr or edge can bend and fold over creating a dull edge. By using a honing rod/steel we can realign the edge straight using a honing rod to bring the knifes back to razor sharp.
When the honing rod no longer improves cutting performance it may be time to bring out the knife sharpener. The reason the sharpening is required after a certain amount of time is that the peak or the apex of the knife may be so worn down that no matter how much knife honing is done, the knife will ultimately need to be sharpened.
Although we wont go into detail of the various knife sharpeners in this article, we do suggest either using sharpening stones, sharpening wheels or belt sanders to sharpen your knife, we not recommend using pull through knife sharpeners due to the fact that they tend to remove too much metal material and leave the knife edge worse than before the sharpening.
The next items on the list would be always to dry your knife completely after washing and to use a knife block or a magnetic knife wall mount for storage. Using a knife block or a wall mount is to prevent the knives from colliding with other knives or other tools causing premature wear or even chipping the knife edge.
With these 3 basic kitchen accessories this should prolong the performance of you knife and extend the lifetime of your knife.
If you need professional knife sharpening in Edmonton Alberta, feel free to contact us here!
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