5 Biggest Lies Of Knife Sharpening

Hello guys, welcome back to Ryky. So, I want to take a few minutes and talk about the five

biggest

myths I've encountered on my channel. Myth number one: You have to use sophisticated equipment to sharpen a

knife

properly. Oh, this is... This drives me crazy Look, I want you to come here because I've invested a lot in my channel and a lot in the equipment I use. If you watch many of my videos, you'll see that I use a brick quite often to elevate my

sharpening

stones. And that's really all you need. And to get water you don't need much.

You can buy a food tray like a plastic food tray for $3 to $4. I use a silicone mat because it is very nice and portable. And then all you need is some type of rubber liner or a towel between the brick and the whetstone. That is. That's all you need in terms of

sharpening

base. And certainly, look, there's nothing wrong with going out and buying a $25 container plus a $100 bridge or, you know, a $200 Shapton sharpening pond plus another $20 rubber base. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you have the financial means to do it, do it.

Everything is fine there. So, the myth of fancy equipment: no. Arrested. You don't need fancy equipment to sharpen your knives. Myth number two is funny because I recently received a comment that says, "Professionals sharpen with whetstones and non-professionals sharpen with electric sharpeners." It's almost like saying that unless you're a chef, you shouldn't cook. And if you're not a chef you should make TV dinners or frozen dinners. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me. There are a lot of comments on my channel saying that

knife

sharpening is 90% technique and 10%, you know, accessories or goods.

I want to go a little deeper into this and say that sharpening a knife is about being willing to try. Well, if you are willing to try and experiment you can sharpen your knife. So, I'm not downplaying the technique at all, please understand. But what I am saying is that, in my personal opinion, what is even more important and deeper than technique is your will. I'll leave it up to you to extrapolate whatever you want from that little comment, but I'll leave it there. Myth number three is: you have to thin a knife with each sharpening.

Oh, this drives me crazy. Oh. The whole issue of thinning a knife... I think it's one of the most debated arguments among knife enthusiasts. And there are circumstances where you need to thin the knife, but for the 99% of knife sharpening people who watch my videos, who are cooks in the kitchen, thinning the knife is not something you have to worry about for a long time. long time. If you've watched my channel in the last six months or so, you'll have seen me restore several knives. And on two occasions I have restored two Shun. In reality, they had between 3 and 3.5 millimeters of indentations.

And so even, you know, shaving off 3 millimeters of edge, I still didn't feel like those edges needed to be thinned. So, think about this for a second: how many years do you think it would take the average knife user to polish 3 to 4 millimeters of the edge of their knife? I mean that's been going on for like a decade, if not more. I have spoken to many chefs who have been using the same Wüsthof for over 20 years. And they have never thinned their knives. In fact, they never sharpened their knives. Hear from the chef who actually makes a living using knives.

It is not necessary to thin the knife. It adds a whole different layer of complication. Several of these chefs tell me that all they do is sharpen their knives every three or four meals. And that's all they do. They have been doing it for decades. When I asked him, "How do you sharpen your knives?" They look at me and just laugh or just look at me in... Myth number four. This one also drives me crazy. You have to flatten your stones before or after each sharpening. If I get a nickel... Well, maybe not a nickel. I want to make it very clear: I'm not trying to say this isn't important.

If you are a sushi chef and you sharpen Yanagiba's for a living... This does not apply to you. You don't need to crush the stone every time. Now look, there are certain cases where you need to do that, like sharpening a Yanagiba or Deba or a single bevel knife, where that is an important thing. But for those of us, we simply sharpen knives in the kitchen: chef knives, western chef knives or even Japanese chef knives... You don't have to worry about flattening your stone. And last week I sharpened a Masamoto KS, which was dull on the brick, on Chosera #3000.

And I loosened it. And I was able to get a singing score up. PT50A according to Edge-on-up sharpness level sheet. Anything less than 200 is considered very sharp. So, I was able to sharpen a knife using a stone that has not been flattened in 60+ sharpenings and a sharpener. If you're just a hobbyist or a home cook, you don't really have to worry about getting a super flat stone because it doesn't make any difference. So myth number five is pretty big. Is this. There are people who say that you have to sharpen a knife a certain way or it won't sharpen or it won't sharpen correctly.

Oh... The point of my videos, the point of what I do here is that I'm experimenting with different techniques with different processes and just reporting what works for me. This is how my channel started. Three or four years ago I was researching knives and sharpening techniques. And so, I went to the forums like most people did. I Googled techniques for sharpening knives. And I'm going to YouTube. And I watched the amount of videos and read a lot of threads on the forum. And in reality they all say the same thing. There are three or four authorities out there that are preaching this... these, you know, processes that you have to follow: you have to flatten your stone, you have to sharpen at 12 degrees, you have to thin your knife. .

And when I went and bought certain stones... I went to buy certain knives and tried different things. Nothing I was discovering in my own time really matched what people were saying. So what do we take away from all this? Well, what I really want to stress is that sharpening knives is not that difficult. I'm being completely honest if you can get over the fear of cutting yourself and scratching yourself with the knife. And I know that the emotion of fear is very strong and I don't want to downplay it. My only suggestion to you is: start very slowly and take your time.

Don't rush, don't try anything crazy. And over time you will overcome that fear of cutting yourself. Physically it is different. For most of us, we don't have anything we do in normal life where we hold a knife a certain way and push and pull. Therefore, this movement may not be very natural for many people. If you can text on your phone, if you can do a word search on YouTube, you can sharpen a knife. It is easy. If there is one thing I want you to learn from this video, it is that you don't have to be a special person to learn how to sharpen a knife.

Anyone can learn how to sharpen a knife if they are willing to try. Here's a question: "Do you feel strongly for or against any of the arguments I've made in this video?" If so, please leave a comment. You know I read all my comments. I know this video is going to generate a lot of commotion, but that's the truth of it all.