by Tim Hayward
Now the edge must be aligned or honed. This means rubbing the edge against a surface that gently pushes it, from both sides, until it is precisely in line with the blade. Honing materials can vary. In the food world, blades are traditionally honed with a steel, a plain metal rod in a handle, while barbers and, oddly enough, surgeons have traditionally honed their ferociously sharp blades on leather ‘strops’. I know one good butcher who hones his knife on the metal edge of his butcher block and one knife collector who hones his on the pages of Vogue. Glossy magazine paper – coated with a gypsum-like material and rolled under pressure to give it that superb finish for ink – makes a surprisingly excellent material for ultra-fine honing and polishing.*
It is important to understand the difference between ‘stoning and honing’, abrading and aligning, because different sharpening systems can do both to some degree. Coarse water stones, for example, strip metal off a knife edge at a terrific rate, making that ‘wedge’ with great efficiency, but the finest grades have so little abrasive quality that they merely ‘polish’, taking away almost nothing but helping to align the edge. A traditional metal ‘steel’ has no abrasive qualities at all and is merely there to align the edge where a more modern ‘diamond steel’ – coated with a fine dust of industrial diamond abrasive – can wear a knife away as fast as a wheel. Even strops can be plain leather, with no abrasive, or dressed with a ‘compound’ that’s a very fine abrasive.
Sharpening well, by hand, is actually a lot simpler than is usually assumed. It’s a forgiving process which will almost certainly result in a better cutting edge no matter what you do… but it does depend to some degree on your ability to present the blade to the work surface at a reasonably consistent angle. This makes people nervous. Proprietary knife-sharpeners take away that worry by fixing the sharpening medium at the correct angle and guiding the blade through. Expensive ones have two wheels spun by an electric motor and some use two mini-‘steels’, set in a v-shape with a guide to hold the knife in the right position.
For serious blade geeks in other, less benign, areas of knife worship, there are very expensive sharpening jigs which clamp the knife in position and then allow you to sweep a selection of small, flat waterstones along the blade with a long pivoting arm. These I feel are vital for creating the kind of visually perfect edge that matters to collectors but may be a bit much if you’re mainly about getting faster at reducing onions to dice.
A knife-sharpener, if you’re prepared to stump up a few quid, is no bad thing. I often recommend the Japanese ones to friends who don’t necessarily have the time or the inclination to hand-sharpen. They guarantee a great, working result for almost no effort and immeasurably enhance the experience of cooking. They do, though, work by abrasion, which means they chew through your knives at speed.
Here’s the thing though – and I’m probably oversharing here – but being alone in the kitchen, after everyone’s tucked up in bed, with something nice on the radio and my knife roll and stones… Well, it’s contemplative, meditative, calming. Taking each knife out of its place, remembering how it performed last time, correcting it gently, improving it, caring for it and getting it ready to work again – it’s just lovely. The time and effort you spend maintaining your knives is the thing that distinguishes them from all other tools. A set of sockets is as dumb as a bag of spanners: a roll of knives is something that has as much in it as you’re prepared to give. Sharpening your knives, in the end, is what it’s all about.
STONE
Since the first metal knives were made they’ve been sharpened on stones. You can still pick up a smooth pebble and use it to align your blade but the best naturally occurring sharpening stones are those with hard abrasive particles – or ‘grit’ – in a softer matrix. As the grit abrades the metal the stone itself is worn away, making a constantly renewed, flat abrasive surface.
Natural stone whetstones are quarried in various parts of the world and are beautiful things, but obviously there is very little consistency in the size of grit. Man-made stones – made of carefully graded abrasive grit and bound in a resin or ceramic matrix – are therefore more commonly used.
Japanese knives are sharpened using three stones, the arato, nakato and shiageto (coarse, medium and finishing, respectively). A fourth type, the nagura, is used to flatten the medium and finishing stones and create a polishing slurry on the surface. Lubricants are necessary on most sharpening stones and good edges are made on tools with carborundum stones and oil. Japanese stones, though, would clog with oil so they are soaked in water before use and the cutting surface is splashed with it while working. This is why Japanese stones are called ‘water stones’.
GRITS
120 – 500 Very coarse grit. Only for grinding an edge on a knife blank or serious reshaping
500 – 2000 Coarse grit for initial grind and removing small chips and irregularities
2000 – 6000 Medium grit to remove scratches and refine edge
6000 – 10000 Fine grit to polish and hone
Stones come in different shapes and sizes and some as ‘combinations’ with blocks of two different grits bonded back to back. Good brands to look out for are King (Ice Bear or Sun Tiger), CERAX, Shapton and Naniwa.
With water and grit splashing about, sharpening can be a messy business. You can hold your stone steady on a folded cloth but a stone clamp will enable you to work over the top of a tray of water – a convenient and cleaner option.
Stones should be kept clean and dry between sessions, either in their original boxes or in plastic or wood cases.
STEEL
There’s nothing TV producers like more than their celebrity chef staring down the camera while nonchalantly ‘sharpening’ his huge knife on a hone or steel. It’s a wonderfully powerful image, and I’m sure there are therapists who could make a lot of money out of analysing the behaviour, but in truth I bet the chef won’t be doing it with his favourite knife. Regular steeling to realign the blade is important when you’re working with the knife all day but it’s not something you can do without a degree of concentration and care. The steel is harder than the blade and banging them together in a showy, noisy display will cause irreparable harm, no matter how good it looks.
Any bar of good, hard steel can be used to hone the blade – in some butcher’s you’ll see them doing it on the metal binding brackets at the corner of the chopping block. But the traditional rod shape in a handle is convenient and, particularly for high volume meat and fish processors, means that it can be worn at the belt in a holster or on a hook, easily to hand.
Though a smooth finish does the job well, many steels are supplied with longitudinal ribbing. Depending on how hard your knife is this may actually have an abrasive effect and remove some material.
More popular today is the ‘diamond’ steel, often with a flatter, oval profile and coated with a ferocious abrasive material. These things could probably put a working edge on a length of railway line in just a few inept strokes – they do so by tearing away huge amounts of metal. Although a tremendous boon in the commercial environment, where unskilled people can keep lethal edges on cheap knives, if you have a knife you care about I’d honestly rather watch you put it through the dishwasher than go at it with one of these.
STROP
The word ‘strop’ comes from the same etymological root as ‘strap’ and it is usually precisely that: a leather strap or belt, hanging from something solid at one end, against which you c
an rub your blade, the hard surface of the leather gently pushing the blade edge into perfect alignment. You’ll have seen barbers doing it with razors. That kind of ‘flip-flop’ action on the tight, stretched leather seems to work perfectly for the short, straight edge of a razor but it can be a bit more challenging to carry off with a full-size kitchen knife. Flat ‘bench’ strops comprise a bigger piece of leather, glued to a board, usually with some sort of handle to hold them steady while working.
A new strop is just naked, untreated hide but many people like to ‘dress’ it with a polishing compound, basically a very, very fine abrasive in a waxy base that is rubbed on to the leather like polish. There are several grades of polishing compound available but for the very finest results you can use ‘jeweller’s rouge’ (a mildly abrasive automotive polish like Autosol available online) or – the secret weapon of several knifemakers – cheap toothpaste.
Personally, I reckon the blade should be sharp and polished enough that I don’t want any further abrasive involved in what is always the last stage in the process. As most flat strops are double-sided though, it might be a good compromise to dress one side.
WHEEL
Much human ingenuity has been expended on the foolproof domestic knife-sharpener with varying degrees of success. In principle it should be simple to arrange a sharpening medium at a precise angle and in such a way that even the most harried home cook could drag the knife through it and put on a good edge. Many have tried and many have failed – probably because such an arrangement would only work with a knife that was otherwise well looked after. A sharpener works well for the first few months but, once you’ve used your knife as a can-opener, snapped off the tip and pressed it into service as a screwdriver, no amount of dragging it through a gadget is going to rebuild it.
But, even to a true devotee of the stones and the strop, there is remarkable convenience in a knife-sharpener. Something you can turn to to quickly correct an edge when you haven’t time for the full, delightful ritual.
Japanese water stone sharpeners have two small wheels, made of the correct grade of stone, between which the blade is pulled. They are cleverly arranged so the sides of each wheel create the correct grind angle and the motion of the blade gently rotates them to provide a constantly renewing sharpening surface.* There is also a small water reservoir below to keep the stones both wet and clean.
I will be honest here. A good water stone, wheel-type sharpener, used carefully and with the wheels regularly replaced with fresh ones, will make a beautiful edge on a knife. Depending on your skills, possibly as good as you’ll get with bench stones. The only thing they lack is the requisite sense of ritual. Sure… you don’t have to drag the whole sharpening kit out of the cupboard and spend half an hour honouring and polishing your favourite blade but, well… isn’t that the whole point?
* ... which is why, after much consideration, this book is printed on uncoated stock – we didn't want you misusing it.
* If you have a single-ground knife, you can buy a wheel set with a slightly different angle and with one polishing rather than sharpening wheel. These also work very well but it’s obviously vital to pull the knife in the same direction over the wheels every time.
KNIFE ROLL
THE TRADITIONAL CHEF’S KNIFE ROLL was a thick, white canvas affair with pockets for the handle-end of the knives. This provided no real protection against the blades knocking into each other but, as they’d easily cut through any canvas pocket they were thrust into, there was no really sensible way to reverse the knives. Many chefs would interlace a kitchen cloth or towel between the blades to keep them apart when the roll was closed but this did nothing to protect anyone if they dropped the roll or picked it up incorrectly. The traditional roll worked well if the knives were mainly being stored in a drawer or locker and if the whole thing was fitted into a metal toolbox when being carried for any distance.
Today, knife rolls are available in all kinds of materials, from the original heavy canvas to Cordura ballistic nylon and even wonderfully flashy models in leather. When choosing a knife roll consider two things above all: firstly, safety from cutting yourself while carrying knives or when removing one for use; secondly, protecting the blades from damaging each other.
Plastic or magnetic blade guards that clip on to each blade can help, as can velcro restraints inside the roll and, in some cases, a heavy sheepskin lining.
KNIFE RACK
THERE IS ONE, slightly obsessive, piece of workshop practice that I’m proud to have inherited from my grandfather. Ron believed that any tool that wasn’t either in your hand or in its designated storage space was an accident waiting to happen. It’s a good system – so good, in fact, that it’s standard practice in places like operating theatres and Formula One pit areas. When the patient has been closed up or the car is back on the track and doing 200mph, that’s precisely the wrong time to notice that one of your tools is missing. In the same way, the worst time to notice that your yanagiba has gone missing is when your mother-in-law has ‘popped it in the sink for a nice wash’ and the suds are going that ominous carmine colour.
This is why I love magnetic knife racks. Sure, they look great – keeping all your lovely knives on permanent display, not damaging each other in a drawer – but I also look at that rack often when I’m working in the kitchen and if a blade is missing, and it’s not in my hand, I know it’s waiting to cause trouble and I can stop and hunt it down.
Magnetic strips are available cheaply from kitchen supply houses and their only disadvantage is that they can scratch the backs of your blades. There are terrifically expensive racks with powerful magnets channelled into the back of gorgeous pieces of wood which overcome this problem, but I prefer the tip I was given by James Morton, baker/brewer/doctor and knife freak. Cover the front of your magnetic rack with a strip of chamois leather. The other knives will hold it in place and there’ll be no more scratching.
CUTTING BOARD
THE BUTCHER’S BLOCK is made from dozens of blocks of wood set on end and bound together. This means that the cleaver or knife bites into the yielding ‘end-grain’ of the wood, which gently parts – protecting the blade edge – and then self-heals. It is often assumed that wooden cutting boards are out of favour with regulators for reasons of hygiene but actually this is not true.* However, in a commercial kitchen, colour-coded boards make it much easier to control cross-contamination and the polypropylene material of which they’re made means they can make dozens of trips through a scalding dishwasher.
The traditional Chinese cutting block is circular and thicker in cross-section than the ones we’re used to. Western chefs rarely cut parallel to the board and if they need to – perhaps for filleting fish or the very last slice of bread – they must pull their board to the very edge of the table so there’s space for their knuckles. With a thicker board, the Chinese chef can flip the cai dao and cut horizontally as easily as vertically. Watch a Chinese chef at work and you’ll see a lot of horizontal cutting. This may be why the Western knife roll features more flexible knives which can be bent to make a horizontal cut.
Glass, marble or stone cutting boards are… well, I hope you know enough about knives now to understand that anything on which you can sharpen or hone a blade is going to do immeasurable damage when cutting directly into it.
Use an end-grain wooden cutting board if you can, polypropylene if you must, and keep it clean. Best of all, cut lovingly and gently so the knife edge touches the
surface with as little trauma as possible.
Love your knife. It will love you back.
* ‘There isn’t any strong evidence that one type of chopping board is more or less hygienic than another, whether plastic, wooden, glass or even marble. What is important is that the board gets cleaned properly after every use and is replaced if it gets damaged, for example from deep cuts or scoring, because this will hinder proper cleaning. You can also stop germs spreading by having separate chopping boards for raw and ready-to-eat foods.’ Food Standards Agency (food.gov.uk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Tim Hayward
Thanks to the knifemakers, chefs, collectors and geeks who shared knowledge, knives and enthusiasm.
Particular thanks to Jon Warshawsky, James Ross-Harris and Richard Warner from Blenheim Forge, Jay Patel and Rishit Vora from the Japanese Knife Company. To Joshua Heaton, possibly the best edge-man in London at the moment, and to Henry Harris whose vast knowledge, erudition and willingness to teach would surely, in any more civilised culture, have us revering him as a sage.
Thank you to my ever accommodating butcher and advisor Jon West, and Dr Annie Gray for rigorous debate. Though we’ve never met, I’d like to thank Jose Grant Crichton (née Gilpin) who entrusted me with the family treasure of her father Nat’s knives, and to Scott Grant Crichton who facilitated the loan. Amidst all the spectacular knives we featured, Nat’s were the most inspiring to have in your hand.