9 Simple Tips for Keeping Kitchen Knives Sharp
Extend the life of your knives and keep your culinary skills on point with these easy care tips.
If you know your way around the kitchen, you fully understand the importance of a sharp knife. While fancy knife skills are impressive, using a dull knife is bad for the knife and a potential safety concern. Fortunately, it’s so easy to keep your knives as sharp as possible at home that you will forget your visit to the local knife sharpener.
Related: The 11 Best Chef’s Knives of 2023
Why Sharp Knives Are Important
A sharp knife is crucial whether you’re just getting into cooking or are a self-proclaimed MasterChef. You may have heard that good cooks are only as good as their tools, but the reasons for maintaining a sharp knife are important.
The number one reason is safety. While it may seem counterintuitive that a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one, this is the case. A dull knife often requires much more pressure to move through food, increasing the odds that the knife will slip off the food. Sharp knives, on the other hand, need very little pressure to easily move through food, significantly reducing the risk of slippage.
On the culinary side of things, dull knives can result in sloppy-looking knife cuts, severely hindering your ability to perfectly dice, slice, julienne, and mince any food your heart desires. While this might not matter to some home cooks, the opposite couldn’t be more true for others.
So, to keep your kitchen as safe as possible and your cutlery skills on point, regular knife maintenance is critical whether the knives are serrated, inexpensive, antique, or top-of-the-line.
9 Tips for Keeping Your Knives Sharp
Here are the best tips and tricks for keeping your knives sharp.
1. Don’t Throw Your Knives in the Sink
When tidying up the kitchen after cooking, it’s a common practice for many of us to throw our dirty cooking utensils and pans into the sink to be cleaned after the meal. However, it’s imperative you don’t do this with your sharp cutlery. Metal-on-metal interaction dulls the blade. Instead, leave a knife on the cutting board next to the sink to be cleaned after you finish eating.
2. Choose the Right Cutting Surface
A knife stays sharper for much longer if you invest in a chopping surface made of a suitable material. Cutting on aluminum, stainless steel, concrete, granite, or marble can dull or damage a blade. Instead, opt for wood, polyethylene, or plastic for your cutting board.
Even within these approved cutting board surfaces, some options are better than others. Avoid a cutting board that is easy to cut into, as this can create the perfect environment for bacteria to thrive—especially if you’re using the surface for cutting meats, fish, or poultry. A hardwood cutting board is more than worth the investment, even if it’s a bit pricey.
Related: Why You Should Absolutely Be Oiling Your Wood Cutting Boards Regularly
It’s also important not to use the sharp edge of a knife to scrape food off a cutting board into a pot, saute pan, or bowl; the action dulls the blade. Instead, use the spine of the knife or a scraper to move food off the board.
Related: The 14 Best Cutting Boards
3. Regularly Use a Honing Rod
What often happens when knives are “dulling” is the metal edge of the blade is pushed to one side or the other. Visualize hair sticking straight up being a sharp knife, whereas a comb-over would be a dull one. This is where a honing rod comes into play. This long rod of coarse steel isn’t meant to sharpen the knife but rather realign the blade edge back into place, helping prevent significant knife damage and keeping the edge maintained for a longer time. It doesn’t remove a significant amount of metal from the blade as a true sharpening does.
To use a honing rod, hold the knife in one hand and the rod in the other and make big sweeping motions with your knife at a 15- to 20-degree angle across the rod, making six to eight passes on each side. However, watch a YouTube video before trying this for the first time. Many chefs use a honing rod with their primary knife before every use, but putting this inexpensive kitchen tool to use once a week should do the trick for everyday cooks.
4. Don’t Delay Cleaning Your Knives
Another secret to keeping your knives as sharp as possible is to clean them after every use. This prevents any food residue buildup on the blade, potentially causing dullness. Even if you aren’t planning to clean up the kitchen until after dinner, wipe the knife immediately after using it and then hand-wash it later. It’s critical that you hand-wash your good knives. Dishwashing sharp, high-quality knives leads to dullness and damage due to the heat, detergent, and water pressure of the dishwasher, not to mention the potential for the knives to be banged around in there.
5. Make Sure to Dry Them
Sharp knives also shouldn’t be air-dried on the drying rack as they might rust (depending on the blade material). Rusting dulls the blade and reduces the lifespan of the knife. Even worse, if a knife is put back into a knife block wet, harmful mold and bacteria can grow inside. Towel dry them instead using a clean microfiber cloth.
6. Invest in a Sharpening Tool
Even if you’re a regular honing rod user, every knife needs an actual sharpening every few months. Sharpening shaves away some metal to create a renewed knife edge. This task can either be done at home or by a professional. If you’d like to try your hand at home sharpening, there are a few options.
One option is to invest in a tool called a whetstone, sharpening stone, water stone, or diamond. As you might guess, This tool is stone or ceramic and comes in many different grit levels. It both sharpens the knife and smooths it out for a beautiful finish, depending on the grit; many whetstones have two sides to accomplish both tasks. While every whetstone has a specific set of instructions, you usually move the knife across the grit of the stones at an angle to sharpen and smooth it.
Electric knife sharpeners are also available, featuring multiple slots to drag a knife through for sharpening, honing, and sometimes smoothing. While this is a more convenient, less technique-driven method than a whetstone, it is more expensive. Also, there is greater room for error, as you can’t see what’s happening with the blade while the sharpening is taking place, and blades can be damaged if the wrong angle, pressure, or stroke is used.
Related: The 9 Best Knife Sharpening Systems of 2023 to Make You Feel Like a Pro Chef
7. Consider Using the Bottom of a Ceramic Mug
One additional way of sharpening a knife uses a ceramic mug that you have sitting in your cupboard. Yes, you read that right. Although this method is controversial, the unglazed, gritty circle of ceramic on the bottom of mugs can sharpen a knife in the same way a whetstone would. However, if you’re not careful, you can damage your knife by doing this, so give this a shot only with your cheaper knives.
8. Be Mindful of Storage
Storing a knife correctly is also essential in keeping it sharp. In the same way that you don’t throw a knife in the sink or the dishwasher, you also don’t want it jostling around uncovered in a kitchen drawer. This can lead to serious damage to the knife, such as chipping of the blade, not to mention it’s not the safest move.
Options for properly storing knives that preserve their sharpness and keep your fingers intact include knife blocks, magnetic knife strips, and knife covers. As mentioned previously, it's essential to ensure the knife is clean and dry when using a wooden knife block because bacteria and mold are happy to grow inside. Also, jamming a knife into a knife block can result in a dulled blade.
While magnetic knife strips work for many cooks, they can also be tricky. If you bang a knife onto it too hard, you could dull or damage the blade, and if a knife falls from a magnetic strip for some reason, it can be dangerous. You can keep your favorite knife in your kitchen drawer without concern for microbial growth, falling knives, or cut fingers by opting for a plastic or wooden knife cover, guard, or sheath.
9. Use Your Nice Knives for Food Only
Use your quality knives for food only. While this may seem obvious, many people often grab a knife for non-food tasks, including tearing into food packaging, cutting parchment paper or butcher’s twine, and opening cans. All these actions can reduce the sharpness of a knife and can lead to slips.
Make sure you cut only fresh food with your knife, never frozen. Taking your fancy knife to a block of frozen food can chip the blade, which will spell the end for a beautiful knife. Additionally, make sure to use the right knife for whatever food you’re cutting, such as a serrated knife for bread, a filet knife for deboning fish, and a paring knife for hulling strawberries.
With these nine tips, you should be well-equipped to make sure your knives stay super sharp between sharpenings while avoiding damaging activities to both yourself and your knives.
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