paulraphael

Belt grinders have their place ... major reprofiling, repairs, etc... Someone skilled can use them to sharpen a knife up to medium grit or so (Dave Martell at Japaneseknifesharpening.com uses them for all European knives and for Global knives). I think he takes them to around 2K. I don't know anyone who does finishing sharpening on them on good knives. Waterstones are the overwhelming weapon of choice for most people. Equivalent results are possible by mounting fine grit automotive sandpaper on glass, but the sandpaper is so short-lived that this becomes tedious (I'm one of many who tried it and eventually bit the bullet and got stones). Systems like the edge pro work on double bevel knives. They are slower, and don't offer much choice in stones, but they work. Oil stones work too, but they're slow and aren't available in the finest polishing grits. Some people use kanabans (not sure if I'm spelling it right) ... iron blocks sprinkled with powdered abrassives. Sounds messy, but no reason it wouldn't work fine. Buffing wheels can give decent edges, but round the edge slightly, because of the flexibility of the material. This has been studied a bit. You can always get a sharper edge on a stone or similar hard-planed surface.

I checked with my fish expert, and he disagrees with me. He thinks a yanagi is indeed a little better than a western salmon knife, but that its thick spine (not its stiffness) makes it less than perfect for big slices along the grain. He thinks a takobiki (octopus knife) and even a very sharp sujihiki are better. This last one surprised me, since its a double beveled knife. Best of all are specialized Japanese salmon and sole knives (Glestain gets top marks; Misono and Global are supposed to be good too). I don't know anyone who actually has one of these. I'm going to try my sujihiki.

I wrecked my leather strop, and since I felt I didn't deserve another one, started using paper. I just found some 100% cotton paper that didn't seem to have any abrasive coatings on it, and glued it to the same block my leather strop had been on. I rub green chrome oxide powder into this (same thing that's in that paste). Works fine. Stropping takes a couple of minutes, and lets me put off the water stones for a few weeks. Some purists dislike strops, and do all their touch-ups on fine stones. I've been won over by the speed and lack of mess.

I've been trying the wet, crowded pan method, and am not fully convinced. The shrooms are fine, but don't end up with as much of the browned crust I get when I do them the traditional way. As far as oiliness goes, I've never found that to be a problem. I've only played with criminis ... maybe other mushrooms are different.

You'd never want to give a good knife to someone like that. The world is full of professional sharpeners who are in the business of cranking out serviceable edges in a hurry, using power wheels or belt sanders. They will destroy a good knife in the blink of an eye and take years off of the life of any knife. I made the mistake once of following the sage old advice, "just ask where your butcher gets them sharpened." Luckily all I had was Chicago Cutlery knives at the time. They came back with stupefying amounts of metal ground off the edges. Three more sharpenings like that and there'd be nothing left! Oh, they were fairly sharp, at least for the ten minutes that that kind of knife holds an edge ... Services like that make sense for guys like my butcher, who actually rents his knives from the knife grinder. Once a week a guy comes by, takes all the old ones and replaces with a freshly sharpened set. The lifespan of these knives is probably a couple of months, but they're all $10 knives, and the clients pay a flat rate (they have to ... the grinding service is run by the mob). This is a good arrangement for butchers, because raw meat is easy to cut; ragged edges are pretty unobtrusive after cooking, and the knives are mostly used for trimming anyhow; big jobs like cutting steaks from a loin or rib section get done on the bandsaw. His knives are never really sharp, but they're always serviceable. The same arrangement would never work for a prep cook who's trying to do precise work.

I use a felt pad too. I still find that I don't do a great job of getting rid of the last little bit of wire edge, even though most of my knives are much easier than average to sharpen. It took me a long time to figure out I was having this problem.

If two swipes (or even 8) on the fine stone is making that big a difference, then I suspect what you're actually accomplishing is burr removal. Coarse stones will raise a significant burr on the edge, and it can be surprisingly hard to remove. The burr can end up as minute, perfectly straight extension of the edge (called a wire edge) and is one of the more vexing problems in sharpening, especially with some knife steels. The cheapest knives and the most expensive knives often put up the biggest struggle. That wire edge jurts performance and durability. Generally, going from a medium stone to a fine one requires a lot of polishing to fully remove the coarser scratches ... way more than a few swipes. So I'm suspecting that what you've been doing on your fine stone is really just removing the burr; you're going from a bad 1k edge to a good 1k edge. To really take it to a polished 8K (or whatever grit your stone is) edge will take a lot more time on the stone ... and will probably produce mostly subtle improvements.

That's a perfectly reasonable way to go. The cheap stones in the beginning aren't going to hurt your edge in any way. What you get from nicer stones (and some cheap stones are actually pretty nice) is qualities like better feedback, quicker results, less dishing ... stuff that makes your life better, not your edges. It will be coarser and toothier, but if it's been well sharpened on the medium stone it won't be horrible. It will do some things especially well, like slicing slimy or fibrous foods. You can shave with a knife that's been well sharpened at 1K. But it won't push cut as well as a polished edge. And it won't leave the kind of glass-smooth, undamaged finish on food that a polished edge will leave. You give up some big advantages, like cut herbs that stay fresh, and fruits that don't brown.

Are there any fundamental differences between these techniques besides the angle of the cut? I've done both, but always thought of them as variations on the same motion.

The names for cutting techniques are confusing. I've had Japanese cooks refuse to tell me because they knew I'd never remember half of it. What I did pry out of some people is that there are names for very basic cutting motions (like sogi-giri and tsuki-giri), which are not too plentiful, and then hundreds upon hundreds of names for knife cuts as applied to individual foods (like the needle ginger cut that Hiroyuki mentioned).

It is a curious phenom ... i've noticed it a few times. The good news is that if you add another polishing stone, like 8K to 10K, that blade will probably fall through tomato skin like it's not even there.

Is there a difference between sogi giri and the slicing technique used on ginger (in step 2) of the link Chris posted?

That technique is called sogi-giri (diagonal slicing). You cut toward your free hand so you can support the thin slice with your fingers and keep it from crumpling. Your fingers also give you great tactile feedback ... they tell you just where the edge of the blade is, and help you maintain consistent thickness. It's much more precise than trying to cut thin slices away from your free hand. It also works with the natural way your wrist turns. A key to Japanese cutting is keeping your whole arm relaxed, and allowing the blade and your hand and forearm to naturally fall into alignment. It helps with everything. Seems scary at first, but once you get used to how much feedback you get from your free hand, you realize it's very unlikely that you'll cut yourself. It's true that this technique was developed with single bevel blades, but it's also effective with a gyuto or slicing knife.

How high a grit to you use for the final polish on the UX10? My general impression is that both a toothy edge (like what's on your chef's knife and mine) and very highly polished edge will slip right through things like tomato skin. But there's a kind of nowhere land somewhere between 4000 and 8000 grit that has a lot of performance shortcomings, including sliding on tomato skin. These edges can look fairly polished, though.

The original question begets another question: what do we mean by "sharp?" Sharpness, in general, is a factor of the fineness of the edge (how close the bevels come to each other); the refinement of the edge (how well polished the edge is); and the geometry of the edge (how acute the bevel angles are). There's realy never an advantage to having an edge that's not sharp in the first sense. you want the bevels to come together as closely as possible, or the knife won't cut anything well. The refinement / polish of the edge gives you some wiggle room. For most tasks, a highly polished edge will perform better, but for some things (like cutting wet or fibrous foods) a coarse polish and toothier edge can be better. Also, only the best knife steels can really sustain a refined, polished edge. It's a waste of time trying to polish the edge on a cheap knife. The bevel angles are the big point of compromise. Very acute angles will give the best performance, but the worst durability. For many heavier tasks, you just have to compromise performance. Lopping off the head of a salmon with super thin-edged gyuoto would be like going four-wheeling in a Ferrari. You'd have fun for a minute, but would rue the repair bills for a long time. A couple of real world examples: my main knife, a thin gyuto, is sharpened to about 7° on a side, and is polished with a 10,000 grit stone to a mirror finish. My German chef's knife, which handles the heavy stuff, is sharpened to a bit over 20° on each side, and isn't polished at all ... the finest stone it sees is 1000 grit. You can see the little grooves in the edge without a magnifying glass. The German knife doesn't slip through food under it's own weight, and it doesn't leave quite the same glass-smooth finish on food as the Japanese knife, but it's mighty enough to do things like lop the heads off fish and chickens, chop chocolate, and rip through poultry rib cages ... things you'd never do with a thin, delicate edge.

Granton edges generally don't do much. At best, their effect is minimal, maybe even psychological. The exception is Glestain, a Japanese company that has figured out a fairly extreme geometry for the cullens in the blade; these knives seem more immune to sticking than other Western pattern blades. However, for most cutting jobs, good technique does a better job than granton edges. And for thin slices of delicate fish, nothing comes close to asymmetrical geometry of a yanagi. If wielded properly, the bevel shape of a yanagi will slip through delicate fish with virtually no friction. Symmetrical western knives (including ones like mine, or traditional grravlax slicers, or granton edge slicers) just don't work as well, no matter how well they're sharpened. Skill is still more important than the knife ... an old school cook with years of gravlax experience and a Euro slicer will do better than I would with a high end yanagiba. But someone with serious yanagi experience will cut thinner, more evenly, faster, and leave a smoother, shinier finish on the fish.

A long yanagi will outperform every other knife by leaps and bounds, but you'll want to get some instruction on how to use it and sharpen it. The cutting and sharpening are technique intensive. I use a sujihiki, sharpened the way scubadoo describes. It outperforms western slicing knives but is no match for a yanagi in skilled hands.

Janet, I think we agree ... you're mentioning things that are intrinsic to a dish that have to be added at the time of plating. I understood the question as more about all-purpose additions (like maple butter that you add to just about everything).

What's tricky is that "85% cocoa solids" doesn't actualy mean 85% cocoa; it means 85% chocolate, whch itself is some combination of cocoa and cocoa butter. And different chocolates will have significantly different proportions.

That's a pretty fail-safe recipe ... I think the only adjustment you'll have to make is a bit less chocolate and a bit more sugar. Just be extra careful melting the 85% chocolate; I've found chocolates like this can be trickier than other. For more delicate cakes, the way to guarantee substitutions will work is to go to the chocolate manufacturer's websites and find the actual proportions of cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter. Then you can be precise about not just getting the chocolate right, but also the sugar and fat (you can do things like using more or less butter, more or less sugar, etc.).

That's cool. Wish I'd known about it. Was it all traditional single bevel technique, or did they show things with gyutos? Kikuichi's distributor is up the hudson valley, so that makes sense.

Yeah, the truth is, when your Global was new, it was nowhere near as sharp as it ought to be. Factory knife edges are merely serviceable. Many of the higher end J-knives don't even come with a finished edge ... it's assumed that the user will put the kind of edge that they like on it. If your knife was sticking in the board, that's from using way too much force ... probably from treating it like a German knife.

Sugai teaches sharpening workshops, but I've never seen him teach anything technique related. I actually sent them an email once suggested they host skills classes ... they could get some hot shot NYC Japanese or fusion cook to give a demo. Never heard back though. I would think something like that would be valuable, and might even sell a bunch of knives.

Beat me to it!

Yeah, those are traditional techniques for single beveled knives and Japanese cooking. There are decent resources, including books, covering those in depth. What's scarce is tutorials on Japanese techniques adapted for cooking Western foods, particularly with knives like the gyuto. These are generally variations on techniques originally developed for the usuba and yanagi.