Sharpening

It’s important to keep your blade nice and sharp all the time, because if you lose your edge it’s hard to get it back. You have to stay on top of it. I sharpen my knives on a Japanese whetstone every single time I use them. On a daily basis, I use the 1,000-grit stone. If you lose the edge, you’ve got to return to a coarser grit, like 700. I use the 1,000 stone on my butchering knives, but if I want to sharpen one of my softer Japanese blades, I use a 10,000-grit stone. (The reason for this is that the blend of steel in the Japanese knives is more delicate than that of the steel in a butcher’s knife; if I used a coarser grit, it would make the softer knives wear down to nothing way too soon.)