Knives Out

Published to the newsletter March 23, 2020

Hello,

The quickest way to tell an experienced cook from an amateur is how sharp they keep their knives. Sharpening your knife is an easy improvement that will make cooking more enjoyable and even make your kitchen safer.

Many homes have extremely dull rattling knives around their drawers. These dull knives make preparing food more frustrating and difficult: a dull blade makes you use more force when cutting, which leads to wrist and hand strain. It also makes chopping, dicing, or mincing take forever, and even makes onions more painful to cut.

These dull knives are also actually dangerous to use. Many chefs say that dull knives lead to more injuries than sharp ones. When you’re having to really press on a knife every slice, then you’re much more likely to lose control and have the blade slip. And, when you lose control, that blade is now moving much faster and with more force.

So what to do?
The best recommendation we have is get your knife sharpened- preferably about once a year.

Honing steels are useful, but they don't sharpen a knife

You may have a honing steel at home—and if you don’t, you’d probably find one useful! This tool knocks the misaligned edge of a knife back on center. This helps the knife cut better, but it isn’t actually sharpening the blade.

Image taken from this fantastic source on sharpening knives

To sharpen a knife you need to actually polish off (remove) some of the metal from the edge of the blade. You can do this at home with sharpening stones if you want, but most people just take their knives to a professional. We like the people at Bernal Cutlery in San Francisco: they do a great job and are very friendly. In the East Bay you can go to Hida Tool in Berkeley, or even some Sur la Table. Just make sure you call ahead to ensure that they have the staff on hand to help you out.


We hope this was helpful. Knife sharpening is not a service we sell, and we're not trying to force you to spend more on kitchen gadgets. But having dull knives is a major safety issue in many home kitchens. Take a look in your drawers and see which of your tools need some care.

As always, if you have any questions, hit reply and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

All the best,

AJ with Baron's