The expert blog 2020

Honing Steel Mistakes to Avoid (So You Don’t Waste Your Time)

A honing steel can feel like a simple accessory, the kind of tool you toss next to the cutting board and ignore until something dulls. The trouble is that “simple” does not mean “forgiving.” When honing goes wrong, you don’t just waste time, you teach your blade the wrong habits. You may even make the edge feel sharp for a day, then watch it deteriorate faster than before. I have seen this play out in kitchens, workshops, and restaurants. People assume honing will restor

Oct 21, 2026

How to Sharpen Dull Knives Faster: Proven Workflow Tips

A dull knife does not just make your food look worse. It makes the work take longer, it makes you grip harder, and it changes how you move your body over the cutting board. I learned this the slow way, standing over a cutting board at the end of a long day, fighting a blade that should have sailed through an onion. The frustrating part was not that sharpening was “hard.” The frustrating part was that I kept doing it the inefficient way, wasting time between steps. Over t

Oct 21, 2026

How to Sharpen a Bread Knife: Maintaining the Serrated Edge

A good bread knife has a very specific job: it needs to saw through crust without tearing the crumb, then keep doing that consistently loaf after loaf. When people complain that their bread knife suddenly “doesn’t cut right,” they often assume the blade is ruined. Usually it is not. Most of the time, the serrations have simply lost their bite. The fix is sharpening, and the smarter move is building a routine that includes honing, so you sharpen less often and get better res

Oct 21, 2026

Sharpening with Stopwatches: Timing Your Grit Steps Like a Pro

There’s a particular moment in sharpening where the work goes from “I think I’m doing it right” to “I can feel the process clicking.” For me, it happened the first time I started treating grit changes like a machining pass instead of a vibe check. I didn’t just move from coarse stone to fine stone, I timed what I was actually doing. Then I repeated it. The results stopped drifting with my mood, my wrist fatigue, or how rushed I was before work. Stopwatches are not magic.

Oct 21, 2026