PSA: I just spent 2 years sharpening my chef knife totally wrong

I always kept the edge at 90 degrees to the stone like I saw online somewhere. Last week a prep cook from Mexico watched me for 30 seconds and said "you're ruining that blade" - he took my knife and showed me it's supposed to be a 15 degree angle on this Japanese steel. Has anyone else had a coworker catch a basic mistake that made you feel like a rookie after years in the kitchen?

4 comments

4 Comments

owens.cameron19d agoTop Commenter

Read something similar on a knife forum, those Japanese blades are picky.

the_thomas19d agoMost Upvoted

Yeah @owens.cameron you're not wrong at all. Japanese knives are super picky about how you use them. They're hardened to like 62-64 HRC which makes them hold an edge forever but also makes them brittle. Drop one or hit a bone and you're looking at a chipped blade that takes forever to fix. I've seen guys baby those things with special cutting boards and specific cutting techniques, it's wild. For the money you gotta be okay with that kind of maintenance, not everyone wants to deal with it.

riley_schmidt19d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I've heard horror stories about that. There was this guy on a cooking subreddit who dropped his Shun on a tile floor and it chipped so bad it was basically ruined. He said it cost like half the price of the knife just to get it fixed by a pro. People swear by those high end Tojiro and Masakage knives too, but they always warn you to get a decent end grain cutting board and never twist the knife when cutting. Makes you wonder if the sharpness is worth all the hassle for a home cook.

the_parker19d ago

A buddy of mine bought a Kiritsuke from a maker out of Sakai and chipped the tip on the third day using it to scrape garlic off the cutting board. He said the repair was almost a hundred bucks and he had to wait three weeks to get it back from a specialist. For a home cook like me, that kind of hassle just isn't worth the extra sharpness.