How to maintain and sharpen our kitchen knives

It is important to take care of a kitchen knife since we use it continuously for any recipe that we are going to prepare. Also, if you know how to maintain and recover the edge, a good knife can be in the kitchen for a lifetime. For this reason it is worth having good knives, but also knowing how to take care of them.

Maintenance Tips

Knives gradually lose their edge due to use (due to contact with food, both hard and soft), but there are also other acts that accelerate this wear. Therefore, there are several important tips to maximize the edge of your knives:

- Always use a suitable cutting surface : often, for convenience or speed, we cut small things on top of the kitchen counter. Big mistake! Marble is a very hard stone that damages the knife on contact. Always cut on a cutting board (you may be interested in seeing which cutting board to buy? to understand the different types of wood and which are the most appropriate).

- Do not accompany the food with the knife once it has been cut; opt instead to put down the knife and use a shovel, do it with your hand or, another option, is to turn your wrist and accompany them with the knife, but with the part of the blade that does not cut.

- Avoid putting them in the dishwasher

- Try to use whenever you can the knife for the purpose for which it was manufactured : do not cut meat with the vegetable knife, nor vice versa; and don't use it to cut other things either.

- Store them properly : contact with the other utensils in the drawer damages them. Whenever you can, keep them separate - a knife block can help you do that, apart from always having them close at hand.

Wüsthof knife block and block for drawer of the set of 3 Wüsthof knives

Knife sharpening

Over time, the blade wears down and loses its edge. There are three types of sharpening that you may be interested in learning about:

Sharpened with sharpening steel :

Although not visible to the naked eye, the finer edge of the blade is bent. The sharpening steel does not sharpen, but rather helps you maintain that edge. That is why its use should be regular in our kitchen and it is in fact very easy to use:

- Keep the steel in the air with your arm still, or what is more comfortable, place it vertically downwards resting on the counter. It must not move.

- Place the knife at an angle of 20º, and slide the knife along the steel maintaining that angle. We must pass the entire blade along the steel, we start on the side closest to the handle and end with the tip of the knife.

- Repeat the process on both sides of the sheet several times, the same number of times for each side to maintain the symmetry of the sheet. You should not exert force on it.

Honed:

Each knife will have more or less sharpening needs. In the same way, there are different types of stones: coarse-grained stones for edges that are damaged, chipped or blunt, or finer-grained stones to go looking for more precise edges.

In the store we have two types of stones provided by Pallarès, the pink and the green. Both are used for carbon steel (iron) knives and stainless steel knives, but the green stone , of artificial origin, is ideal for grinding and restoring the edge of knives that are quite worn or chipped easily. For its part, the pink stone is a fine-grained natural stone whose origin is one of Pallarès' best kept secrets, but the truth is that it works exceptionally well. It is without a doubt the best we have tried. It is used both to recover the sharpness of a knife and to finely sharpen our knives.

In all cases, the sharpening method will be the same:

- During the sharpening process it is always necessary to keep the stone moist so that it works correctly.

- We sharpen one side of the blade by sliding the blade over its center and up to its end along the stone, moving it away from its body and attracting it back towards us.

- We turn the knife around and work the other side of the blade.

- It is important to always maintain the same angle of the blade on the stone (usually between 15º and 20º).

- Once the knife is sharp, we will clean the knife and the stone well with water.

Sharpened with a knife sharpener

Another very comfortable way to sharpen knives is with sharpeners. These have a slot through which to pass the knives, on each side of which there are stones that help sharpen. All you have to do is insert the knife straight and run it from the beginning of the blade to the tip several times, and the stones do the rest of the work, leaving the knives perfectly sharp.

In the store we have two sharpeners: one, the Kyocera sharpener , has ceramic stones that are ideal for restoring the edge to stainless steel knives. The second sharpener, found in the Wüsthof knife set , has sharpening in two phases: one, to return the edge to a completely dull knife (as if it were a hard stone); the second, for the finest sharpening.

Kyocera sharpener and knife set with Wüsthof sharpener , both for stainless steel knives