The other day La Maya and I drove to an enticing yard sale in a somewhat distant suburb. It was a long drive, but it was worth it, because we landed several good catches.
Best, pour moi, is a Brighton wallet with 19 card slots, a clear ID slot, space for a checkbook, two interior compartments, and a zippered outside pocket. Incredible! The closest style Brighton is advertising today sells for $119. Add Arizona’s 8.3% sales tax for a total of $128.88. I got it for ten bucks.
I also picked up a classic Gerber chrome, diamond-surfaced honing steel, an item that apparently is no longer made. Wüstof makes something similar, $79.95 at Amazon.com, marked down from $140. With local sales tax if purchased from a Phoenix-area retailer: $151.62. My price: $8.
But it didn’t stop there. For another eight bucks I grabbed a brand-new Henckel’s Twin Cuisine Five-Star 10-inch high carbon stainless steel slicing knife: $110 brick-&-mortar retail. Add the 8.3% sales tax, and you’d pay $119.13 for it.
Not bad: $26 for $399.76 worth of merchandise! You could save a fair amount by purchasing from Amazon.com-the Brighton’s not available there, but check out the alleged price difference for the other loot…and the honing steel and knife both qualify for free shipping.
As soon as I got home, I sharpened and honed the knives. The new Henckel’s took a superb edge, and my favorite old standard knives perked right up, too.
BTW, another blogger recently advised using a steel to sharpen your knives and posted a good video showing how to use one. That’s only half the story. A honing steel is for honing: putting the finishing touch on the sharpening process and keeping your knife’s edge polished between sharpenings. To actually put an edge on a knife, you need to use a stone or a knife sharpener.
Using a stone takes some skill. You can learn it, but don’t practice on your best knives until you know what you’re doing. And electric knife sharpeners should should be banned by federal law: nothing will wreck your knives faster than one of those things. They eat into the blade and leave you with a misshapen piece of metal. Over time-and not very much time-an electric knife sharpener will eat away so much of of the blade that your knife is useless.
An effective, easy, and harmless alternative is a manual knife sharpener. They look a bit like an electric sharpener but do not plug into an outlet. And as you can see from Amazon’s little ads, they’re very cheap, especially compared to the $150 price tag on an electric model. You pull the knife through a slot flanked by two stones set at the correct angle. These shape the metal to give you the correctly shaped cutting edge without eating up the knife. Once you have the knife sharp enough that it will slice a sheet of newsprint with no pressure applied, you can run the blade over a steel for a final honing to create that clean, razor-sharp edge.
I have a Chef’s Choice manual knife sharpener. Wüstof makes one for Asian knives, which I’ve not seen in person. They’re cheap and they work: best investment in kitchen gear I ever made.
BTW, if you take your knives to a “professional” for sharpening, ask the person what he uses for the job. If he proudly displays his electric knife sharpener, don’t leave your knives there! Many knife-sharpening shops use the same blade-eating Chef’s Choice electric sharpener you can buy at Amazon.com or Williams-Sonoma. Doesn’t matter who uses it: an electric knife sharpener will destroy your blades.