How, Why, and When to Hone a Knife: MiniTip XVII

TL;DR

It is important to hone your knives when they begin to get dull because the most dangerous item in the kitchen is a dull knife. You can hone it with a honing steel. Watch this video if you need a demonstration.

Tip Expanded

So, if you look at some knives, they have visible serrated edges. These are often used for carving meat and cutting bread. The reason I bring this up is that every knife, at a very magnified level, looks like this. So, the knives where you don’t see any serrated edges, but it is sharp enough to cut a tomato, have tiny serrated edges that you would only probably be able to see with a microscope.

There are two possibilities for why knives may not be able to cut through a tomato without crushing it. The first possibility is that the serrated edges just aren’t as peak-y anymore. So, the blade has actually dulled in this case. So, you want to sharpen it on a whetstone or actual sharpener.

However, for this post, I’m going to be talking about the second possibility. So, imagine the serrated edges, they are as peak-y as they were when you first got it. However, the peaks are pointing in different directions. Some are pointing to the left, some to the right, some down the middle. This is when you hone the knife. If you are not sure, you can try and do both and then you’ve got your bases covered.

One thing to note is when you sharpen a knife, you are losing some of the metal on the knife. So, technically if you keep sharpening it, you’ll be left with a stump, but it would probably take quite a long time, depending on how big the knife is.

The reason you want to hone your knife is that when a knife is dull, you have to push harder or make longer strokes, which can potentially make the knife slip and cut you. We don’t want you to accidentally cut off the corner of your thumb like I did when I was cutting some cabbage a few weeks ago.

I recommend that you hone your knife every time you use it because it just gets all of the grooves back in order in case they got out of order the last time you cut it.

I‘m not sure how to hone serrated edges of knives yet, but I will figure it out and share it with you. For this post, I’m going to just talk about the non-serrated edge knives.

Here’s a video of people much smarter than me showing you how to hone a knife.