Keeping knives sharp is never-ending

Keeping knives sharp is never-ending
                        

You’re at a friend’s house, and the plan for the evening includes cooking something fun. Collecting ingredients is a bout of hilarity after pregame wine warm-up. Eventually, after all the stories have been told and the sharing and oversharing, comes the time when something has to be prepared.

Out comes a cutting board the size of an envelope, scarred and dusty from under the sink or from atop the fridge. On goes a baseball-sized onion, and then a small paring knife comes into play.

You watch, clutching your pinot, as a wobbly mess ensues. Not only is this dumb knife too small for the task, but also it’s as dull as a date with the executive director of the Frump of the Month Club. Should you ask where the bandages are stored now or wait for the bloodletting?

The onion, doing as onions must, releases tear molecules into the air, and in no time your friend is wiping at their eyes and weeping. I don’t like tear juice in my supper, so at this point I would offer help and snatch that dull, bendy, plastic-handled paring knife away. “Oh, I got that at a kitchen tools party,” she says.

“Yes, I see.”

If you’re cooking a lot, you are going to accumulate a lot of knives. For you and me, the starter in the bunch will likely be the Warther knives received as a wedding gift. At least for those, you can take them to the maker for sharpening.

Keeping the kitchen knives sharp is a never-ending task. You should be giving them a quick sharpen before and after you use them for anything — every time. You and I know we aren’t going to keep that kind of schedule unless Gordon Ramsay is hovering nearby calling us a “dull as dishwater donkey.” We sharpen knives when we think about it and have a few minutes.

The internet is well aware of this, and there are a remarkable number of startups devoted to keeping your knives sharp.

Some are a straightforward service. You box up your dull knives and send them off, and they’re returned to you ready to shave a peach. The problem here is most knives lose their edge pretty quickly. This is why we give them a quick stropping before and after slicing the leeks. It seems you would have to send them off constantly, a rather unworkable situation. You can’t send off your knives to be sharpened expecting that to be the only time you need to do that.

There are elaborate tools to remove the clumsy and dumb factor from true sharpening. To do it right, you really need stones of various grit and a lot of practice, a skill worth learning.

Among the new sharpening gadgets is one I’d like to try. It looks like an erector set clamped to the edge of a table. The knife goes into a support bar, and the sharpening stones, held in another piece of the erector set overhead, are employed at just the right angle. I asked Santa for this setup to no avail.

Another gimmick uses a solid square block as a backing brace maintaining the correct angle and a rolling cylinder with a sharpening stone at one end. The cylinder is rolled against the stationary knife. This frankly looks silly.

I recently picked up a doodad that sits on the counter. It has three slots through which the knife edge is dragged repeatedly. The first slot takes off any major burs. The second gives a roughly sharp edge, and the final slot cleans everything up so the end result is a sharp knife with a straight and even edge. It works pretty well, but the only really effective technique is old-fashioned elbow grease on several sharpening stones.

Then you can slip your friend’s dull paring knife into your coat pocket to return nice and sharp later. Or, better yet, buy them a good knife for Christmas and agree to sharpen it for them now and then.


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