Using Honing Steel to Sharpen Kitchen Knives

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'd like to speak with you about what to look for when buying kitchen knives. Something else you're going to need once you invest in your knives is a good high-quality steel. Now, there's a misconception. The misconception is that this is a knife sharpener. This is not. This is not a sharpening steel. They don't exist; the package might say sharpening steel, but it doesn't sharpen anything. It's a honing steel, and what it does is it re-corrects the blade angle. So what happens is, you take your knife here, and you use it for a long time. And if I could zoom in really close, like microscopically close, which I can't do, you would see that over time the edge is no longer straight. It'll actually kind of bend over a little bit, you know, or it'll be like this. It'll be all out of whack. And so you take the honing steel, and you take your blade, and you just drag it across just like that, you know, one for each side. And what happens, is it goes and it re-puts--it re-aligns that edge, it hones the edge of the knife to that correct, you know, straight up angle. So your knife isn't like, you know, this anymore, it's all straight, you know you have a nice straight edge. It kind of basically files off, you know, all of the impurities on the edge--those microscopic nicks and cracks that you're going to have. This will not sharpen your knife; I can't repeat that enough. This will only put an edge back on your knife, or help put an edge back on your knife. Now, how often do you do this? I do it every time I use the knives. I go, you know, two strokes on each side of each knife, every time I use that knife. What you cannot do though, is use it on serrated knives. It doesn't work. So on serrated knives, you just have to be really careful not to make them dull. You also cannot use it on, it just so happens that this also is a single-sided knife, you can't use it on this side, and it?s flat. You could use it on this side, but it would be hard to do it on a serrated knife anyway, so there's no point. So just be careful with your serrated knifes, and get them professionally sharpened when they have to be sharpened. The correct way to use one of these, is you hold it as such, hold it tip-side down--and you don't do this nonsense, where you go shh-shh-shh--that doesn't do anything. So, we're going to move this out of the way. Hold it tip-side down, and this particular model has a little detent in the side, which actually precisely matches the blade angle that they want you to restore it to. So you just line your blade up with that angle, and you just go straight down, just like that. Easy as pie. Same thing with the other side, straight down. Back to here, straight down. Back to here, straight down. That's it, that's all you've got to do. Just give it a couple turns each time, keep your knives in good shape. I do recommend getting your knives professionally cleaned--or professionally cleaned and sharpened. I do mine about once every six months to a year. So that being said, let's move on to our final selections."