Sharpening stones

There is nothing more annoying than trying to prepare your favourite dish and having to cut your ingredients using a knife that lacks sharpness and precision. In fact, more than being annoying, using a knife that is not sharp can be dangerous, because it might lead you to apply force on it and cause an accident. For that reason, regardless of whether you are a professional chef or a home cook, it is very important give proper maintenance to your knives' blades by sharpening them when it is required. Luckily, there are several types of accessories that can be used for sharpening steel blades, and one of the most popular ones are the sharpening stones. 

Here at MyChefKnives, we are glad to be able to offer you a large selection of sharpening stones from some of the best brands of the market such as KAI, Kasumi, Wusthof, and more! Whether you call it sharpening stone or simply a whetstone, this is undoubtedly a very useful accessory in every kitchen, and it is a great option for unexperienced cooks that do not feel at ease using a sharpening steel. Given that not all kitchen knives are constructed in the same way, there are different types of sharpening stones that adapt to each different level of blade hardness and rigidity. However, due to the great number of options available, we can understand that choosing a sharpening stone is not an easy thing to do. Therefore, below we offer you a brief explanation that can guide you to choose the right whetstone for your knife.

How to choose your sharpening stone? 

In order to choose the right sharpening stone, it is first necesary that you know exactly which type of knife you have. Depending on the functionality and the brand of your kitchen knife, the hardness of the blade can vary, and this variation in the level of hardness is important to know which type of grit or grains you need in your whetstone. 

For instance, if you have a kitchen knife with a strong blade that has a hardness rating of 58 HRC in the Rockwell scale such as the knives from the popular Wusthof Classic series, you'll need a sharpening stone with fine grit. On the other hand, if your knife has a lover level of hardness such as 53 HRC, then you will need a whetstone with coarse grit.

It is important to mention that  knives with lower levels of hardness are easier to sharpen, but they need to be sharpened more frequently because they lose faster the sharpness of their edge. Therefore, as you can imagine, knives with harder blades retain for longer time their sharpness, and that is why they need finer whetstones, because stones with coarse grit would end up actually damaging the blade.

To make it easier for you to understand what is the exact value of grit that you need in a whetstone to sharpen your knife, we offer you the following parameters:

Blades with hardness level 53 HRC or less: you need a sharpening stone with truly coarse grains because a fine grit will not be able to restore the sharpness of their edge. Therefore, you need a whetstone with grit  between 240 and 1000.

Blades with hardness level 53 HRC to 58 HRC: since these blades do not reach quite yet a superiour level of hardness, you can use sharpening stones with grit between 800 and 1000. The whetstones with this grit can be used to finish sharpening blunt knives after they have been sharpened with a coarser grit. 

Blades with hardness level 58 HRC to 62 HRC: in here, we already enter in the dimension of knives with an elevated level of hardness. Therefore, they need to be sharpened with fine grains ranging from 1000 to 8000. 

Blades with hardness level 63 HRC or above: this high hardness rating is usually only found in high-end kitchen knives with a damascus construction. These knives tend to retain a high level of sharpness during long time, thus sharpening them require a sharpening stone with fine grit of at least 8000. 

How to use a whetstone?

Choosing the right sharpening stone for your knife was just the first step. Now, it is also important that you know how to properly use your whetstone, because using it in a wrong way can end up damaging both your knife and the whetstone. However, with only a little bit of practice, learning to use a sharpening stone can be super easy, even for cooks without any professional experience.

To make it all easier for you, here we divide and describe you the process in different steps that you can follow whenever your knife need to be sharpened:

First step: Before starting to sharpen your knife, we recommend you to soak your whetstone in water for about 5 minutes. The dampness of the grit allows you to slide the blade smootly without having to apply extra pressure. This step does not apply for natural sharpening stones or Arkansas stones, because these ones require you to apply honing oil to their surface to allow a smooth sharpening movement.

Second step: Now is time to do the actual sharpening. If you have a combination whetstone (meaning that it has two faces with different grit), you always need to start with the coarse grit, and then, the final polishing of the blade is done with a fine grit. While smootly sliding the edge of your knife's blade across the surface of the stone, try to always maintain a stable angle between the blade and stone (in between 15 and 30 degrees). You can use a sharpening angle guide to help you maintain the right angle at all times. 

Third step: By now, your kitchen knife has recovered its sharp edge that lets you cut with ease and precision. However, it is very likely that the surface of your sharpening stone is not flat, and this could be inconvenient for the next time that you sharpen your knife. Therefore, in order to recover the flat surface of your whetstone, we recommend you to use a flattening stone, which you can rub against the surface of the whetstone to make it flat again.