Kitchen Gadgets

If you own a high quality set of knives you must be aware of the hassel involved with sharpening them. High-quality chef knives, be they European brands such as Henkle’s or Japanese such as Global, are made with special steel alloys that require routine sharpening to maintain the knife’s edge. If you use your knives often you must have noticed how quickly they tend to lose their edge. Give them the good old tomato test (trying to smoothly slice through a ripe tomato straight trough the peel with no resistance) and see how gradually they start to loose their tune. If you are serious about cooking you know honing your knives is an almost daily routine task.

The traditional, professional chef sharpening technique involves using either a ceramic stone or hand held pole (often seen on celebrity chef shows). While this is a very photogenic method it requires a very skilled hand and done with an untrained hand might damage the blade permanently. The reason is that different knives have different edge angles and getting the sharpening angle right “by eye” is not easy.

The solution now offered by several home cookware brands is an electric knife sharpener. Electric knife sharpeners work by placing the knife in a special slot while rotating diamond covered disks sharpens it exactly in the right angle. It relieves you of the need to guess the exact angle required for your blade and make the whole process a lot easier, especially of you are not a professional chef. Several slots exists since sharpening is normally done is stages: first the rough stage were the blade is coarsely brought to the desired angle, then a finer disk that helps smooth the edge to enable cleaner cutting. The Chef’s Choice 120 Diamond Hone 3-Stage Professional Knife Sharpener features a third stage when the knife is polished further to create a perfect finish for the edge. When done with these three quick stages your knife will cut through tomatoes as if they were made of butter.

The Chef’s Choice Electric knife sharpener will work on both straight edge and serrated knives so if you own a Japanese Santoku for example, you’ll be able to sharpen it with your unit without problems.
You can buy this unit now on Amazon for only 169.95$. It is available in several colours to fit nicely to your kitchen’s design.