•  Keep Your Knife Clean After Each Use

  •  Wash Your Knife with Soapy Water

  •  Immediately Dry Your Knife

  •  Sharpen And Hone Your Knife

  •  Use The Right Cutting Board

  •  Focus On Storing Your Knives Correctly

Knife Maintenance: Honing vs Sharpening

A sharp knife is always safer and more enjoyable to use. Some knives keep their sharpness for long; some for less. Regardless, all lose it eventually and will do better with a sharper edge.

Sharpening and honing are two main ways knife users utilize to sharpen up a blade.Sharpening and honing are two different things that have similar yet varying outcomes, though both make cutting a tomato easier. The differences are in the tools and how they accomplish a sharper edge. Here is everything you need to know about the differences between sharpening and honing. 

Honing

Honing requires a honing rod and provides a quick fix to restoring a knife’s sharpness. The stick of honing rods is generally made from hard steel, with a stop at the handle that prevents the knife from going past it. 

You take the knife, hold it against the stick at an appropriate angle and rub the edge – more on how to hone and sharpen a knife below. How this process makes the edge sharper is quite simple. 

A sharp knife’s cutting edge is perfectly aligned. This alignment goes out of order in the early stages of dulling, and the knife begins to struggle with cutting. 

Honing can do two things to this damaged edge. It can realign the rugged sections, but more often than not, it removes the rolled edge. How this happens has to do with the kind of wear the edge undergoes and that comes with the type of honing rod utilized. 

Sharpening

Sharpening requires a whetstone (sharpening stone) or a sharpener. Sharpening a knife gives it an entirely new cutting edge. The friction wears out the old, dull edge and replaces it with an untouched one. The goal of sharpening is to reset the edge to make it as sharp as the factory. Honing, on the other hand, wears out only the apex bevel, not the entire edge. While the outcome of sharpening is somewhat better than honing, sharpening can’t be a daily routine. Sharpening a knife removes significantly more material from the blade, and if your customers do this whenever the knife loses its sharpness, they will soon run out of a blade to cut. That said, honing should come first. When it doesn’t satisfy, it’s time to take it to a whetstone or sharpener.