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 we are going to prepare. In addition, if you know how to maintain and restore the edge, a good knife can last a lifetime in the kitchen. Therefore, it is worth having good knives, but also knowing how to take care of them.

Maintenance tips

Knives gradually lose their edge through use (contact with foods, both hard and soft), but there are also other actions that accelerate this wear. Therefore, there are several important tips to extend the edge of your knives as much as possible:

- Always use a suitable cutting surface : often, for convenience or speed, we cut small things on the kitchen marble. Serious 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 suitable).

- Do not cut the food with the knife ; instead, choose to put the knife down and use a spatula, cut it with your hand, or, alternatively, turn your wrist and cut it with the knife, but with the non-cutting part of the blade.

- Avoid putting them in the dishwasher

- Try to always use the knife for the purpose for which it was made : do not cut meat with the vegetable knife, or vice versa; and do not use it to cut other things either.

- Store them properly : Contact with other utensils in the drawer damages them. Whenever possible, keep them separate - a knife block can help with this, as well as keeping them always at hand.

Wüsthof knife block and drawer block for the Wüsthof 3-knife set

Sharpening knives

Over time, the blade becomes dull and loses its edge. There are three types of sharpening that you may be interested in knowing:

Sharpening with a honing steel :

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

- Hold the honing steel in the air with your arm still, or, which is more comfortable, place it vertically downwards resting on the counter. It should not move.

- Place the knife at a 20º angle and slide the knife along the sharpening steel, maintaining that angle. We must slide the entire blade along the sharpening steel, starting with the side closest to the handle and ending with the tip of the knife.

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

Sharpening with stone:

Each knife will have different sharpening needs. Likewise, there are different types of stones: coarse-grit stones for edges that are damaged, chipped or blunt, or finer-grit stones for more precise edges.

In the shop we have two types of stones provided by Pallarès, the pink and the green. Both are suitable for carbon steel (iron) knives and stainless steel knives, but the green stone , of artificial origin, is ideal for roughing out and restoring the edge of knives that are quite worn or easily chipped. On the other hand, the pink stone is a natural, fine-grained 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 useful both for restoring the edge of a knife and for fine sharpening our knives.

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

- During the sharpening process, always keep the stone moist so that it works correctly.

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

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

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

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

Sharpening with a knife sharpener

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

In the shop we have two sharpeners: one, the Kyocera sharpener , has ceramic stones ideal for returning the edge to stainless steel knives. The second sharpener, found in the Wüsthof knife set , has two-stage sharpening: one, to return the edge to a completely dull knife (as if it were a hard stone); the second, for finer sharpening.

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