When you're car breaks down and leaves you stuck on the side of the road, your first thought isn't to visit to head to a dealership and get a new one. When your lawn is so overgrown it looks like a wheat field, you don't pick up a real estate catalog and look for a new home. Given that, why would you throw away your kitchen cutting tools when they get dull? Instead, you could save yourself some money and just sharpen them. Of course, you can't sharpen cutting implements without knife sharpeners. There a lot of different variations of knife sharpeners - there are manual and electric knife sharpeners, and many different subcategories among those.
To sharpen a blade is, on its face, a very basic process that's been used for thousands of years. To sharpen a knife, all you need to do is grind the knife against a stone or other rough surface. So you may be wondering, why not just go grab a stone from your yard and grind away? Unfortunately, it's not that simple, and in fact if you were to do something like that, you'd likely do more harm than good. While it's important for a sharpening stone to have a rough surface (measured according to its "grit"), large bumps in natural stone could damage your knife, its important to only use stones manufactured for that purpose.
The simplest way to sharpen a knife is just to grind it by hand using a whetstone. However, to get your blade back to its optimal shape, you may want to consider more involved setups. Some of these mechanisms use adjustable clamps to hold whetstones at a specific angle. The crock stick setup braces two stones against sticks to maintain the angle - all you need to do is pull the blade through the stones.
It's important to find the right angle when you sharpen your blades. Each blade is designed with certain sharpness in mind - if you sharpen it at a different angle, you may ultimately make the blade too sharp or too dull for it's primary function. Furthermore, if you sharpen a knife at too sharp of an angle, you risk making the blade much more likely to bend or break.
If you're going to buy expensive, high-quality chef's knives, such as those from J.A. Henckels or Wusthof, you're going to want to keep those blades sharp for as long as you possibly can. When a single set of knives can approach $2,000, you should spare no expense to keep those blades in working order using a high quality knife sharpeners.
There are two primary options to choose from: manual and electric knife sharpeners. Manual sharpeners use sharpening stones by hand as mentioned previously, while electric knife sharpeners do most of the work for you - you simply need to keep the blade straight as you pull it through the mechanism. Either method can produce a nice, sharp edge, but electric knife sharpeners provide a lot of convenience and ease of use while being significantly more expensive.
One of the best options for electric knife sharpeners today is the Chef's Choice 120 3 Stage Diamond Hone Knife sharpener, made by Edgecraft. This top of the line sharpener is multi functional, sharpening, honing and polishing all different sorts of cutting implements, even those used for hunting or sport. The Chef's Choice 120 will keep your knives looking and cutting superbly for a long time to come. It does come at a price, though - this model is priced at $150.00. Ultimately, if you're willing to invest in high priced cutting tools, you should invest in a high-quality sharpener too.
For someone looking for manual knife sharpeners, the Spyderco Triangle Sharpmaker is one of the top designs. A third of the cost of the Chef's Choice 120, this set comes with 4 whetstones of various grits. Easy to set up and effective, this is a great option for someone who wants to personally care for his or her knives in a "hands-on" manner.
About the Author:
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