/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>19761407
Scratching up the blade you learn to sharpen on is inevitable. Pic related. But you'll get better.

>>19538715
Second, that knife clearly already needs to be sharpened. There's a significant chip visible on the edge under the "D", to the right of where the dark band hits the edge. If you successfully get the end grain cutting board restored, that should help you avoid chipping, as should good knife technique. Excessive chipping is usually a sign of too aggressive of an edge, or a poor heat treatment on the steel. The same is true of excessive "rolling" of the edge. In an ideal world, neither happens - the edge holds fast and is instead worn away abrasively. Aiming for this balance of hardness and toughness to the application and blade geometry, while trying to maximize both, is the primary goal of fancy knife steels.

The main thing I want to communicate is that you absolutely must find a way to regularly sharpen or have sharpened your knives if you want them to remain useful and you want to be able to cook with them fluently. Even if you bought a $1000 "super steel" knife, you'd still need to regularly sharpen it to keep it performing well - it would just stay sharp longer and would be able to tolerate a pointy-er edge (smaller sharpening angle) without chipping or rolling. And if you pit your cheapo Costco knife, just sharpened, and sharpened well, against a super steel Japanese knife that had been used regularly but not sharpened in a year, your knife would perform radically better.

I haven't used this product, but it's in the style of more expensive knife sharpeners that I'd vouch for, and it shouldn't require the same learning curve as manually using sharpening stones. https://www.worksharptools.com/shop/benchtop/manual/precision-adjust-knife-sharpener/

In the attached pic, you can see that I've scribed a rectangle onto the side of my well-used victorinox fibrox, which allows me to line it up in this sort of jig extremely reliably. This makes touching up the edge very, very fast.

>>19526746
I did find a pic of the knife with the registration marks scratched into it and the wood burl I plan to use for the commission on the background, just so you know I'm not completely full of shit.

>>19526839
It's the jig + registration marks that really make it possible. I can place the knife bang on in the exact same spot, so bringing it back to perfectly sharp takes basically no time.