If your kitchen knife crumbles instead of slicing tomatoes or slips when chopping onions, it's time to sharpen it. Whether you use a hand grinder, an electric grinder, or your choice of whetstone, knife sharpening is a skill every amateur cook should learn. However, there are various knife sharpening tools such as honing & sharpening steels available in the market.
Advantages of a sharp knife:
A sharp knife cuts your vegetables and meat quickly and precisely. Storing sharp knives has two main advantages:
- Safety
- Precision
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Ways to test if a knife is sharp:
Paper Test:
A sharp knife should easily cut a sheet of paper.
Tomato test:
Tomatoes have healthy outer skin with a very soft inside, which means a dull knife will crush the tomato before the skin cracks.
Onion test:
Try cutting the outer skin of an onion. A dull knife can't cut it.
Ways to sharpen your own knife:
Knife sharpening is the method of removing alloy from the knife to create a new sharp edge. There are three ways to sharpen a knife yourself:
- Manual knife sharpener.
- Electric knife sharpener.
- Whetstone.
Precautions when sharpening knives:
Sharpening a knife poses the same danger to your fingers as cutting food with a knife. Therefore, please observe these precautions:
- Never get your finger in contact with the blade.
- Wear kitchen mittens for extra safety.
- If you use Rough, make sure you hold the stone in place or secure it to a table folded under the bars with a rubber pad or damp paper towel.
- When using the pull rod, keep the pull rod and knife away from your body.
- After sharpening, remove any remaining steel powder with a damp sponge or napkin.