How to Sharpen your Culinary Equipment

1. The mistakes that are commonly made in sharpening knives are uncontrolled bevel angles, breaking blades, and leaving the final bevel too rough.

2. Choose an acute direction to sharpen your knife. If you already know what angle your knife is sharpened at, it is best is to sharpen at this angle again. If you don't know your angle but you wish to, ask the blade company or inquire at a kitchen blade store to determine what angle is appropriate for your knife. Otherwise, will have to choose: choose an angle of 10°-30° per side; shallower angles make a sharper edge that doesn't last as long, steep angles are more durable, 17° is a good compromise: select an angle that matches the use the knife will receive. When out looking for a new sharpener, make sure it provides an edge guide mechanism that supports at least a couple of different angles.

3, If you could, use an angle guide to control your edge's angle. Otherwise, you will have to try your best to decide what angle is correct, which is hard and requires a well-formed perception of angles.

4. For a symmetrical edge, make the blade sharper by dragging it across the water lubricated stone in the opposite direction you would move it to slice a thin layer off the stone. This allows a burr to form and that will give the stone sharpener a longer shelf life.

5. Grind away, until you are 50% through the steel on your blade. You don't have to be spot on , just guess. For a one-sided edge ("scandi grind", "chisel grind", etc.),

6. Switch to the other side of the blade and continue creating a new edge; the easiest way to know if you have succeeded is to sharpen until you have raised a "burr", a feature that steel will naturally form when one bevel is ground until it meets another. If you can't see the bevel in the knife, don't worry, but you can feel it scraping/catching on your thumb if you stroke away (dull side of the knife to the sharp) from the edge. Finer stones produce smaller burrs, but they are still there.

7. Switch sides and sharpen the other side of the blade in a similar fashion.

8. Remove the resulting burr by "cutting into" a hone (a finer stone). That is, by keeping a grip on the knife at a controlled angle, move the blade in the opposite direction you moved the blade in steps 4-8. Bogglingly some suggest doing this with a dry stone? for reasons beyond the scope of this article.

9. If you wish, you may decide to polish or even strop the edge to the desired sharpness. For push cutting, stroping the edge's will give you better results (cutting directly into materials, pushing straight down without sliding the blade across the object) but generally impairs slicing ability: without the 'microscopic serrations' left by grinding with a stone, the blade tends to not bite into things like tomato skins.