Sharpen Up!

Maguro Bocho

I had the pleasure of meeting a fantastic Chef named Dennis Johnston, he is a pretty cool guy with the most amazing collection of knives I have ever seen, including Murray Carter dream knives.  The extremely long knife in the picture is designed solely for filleting blue fin tuna, the big ones that they process every day at the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. (Other places too of course)

Dennis uses the unique cleaver for cutting soba noodles.

The purpose of this post is to talk about sharpening though and geared towards those who are starting out. I'll just throw some pictures in here though because I like that.

These beautiful MAC knives are the Thomas Keller edition, I really love MAC's they are not difficult to sharpen and will become extremely sharp. They  have a very nice edge right out of the box as well.


When you are learning to sharpen, it will be tempting to cumulate Japanese Water Stones and perhaps focus on gathering the best and most stones you can afford.  I did this myself and now that I am smarter I have another approach to pass on:

Focus on technique with one stone, the 1,000 grit stone is absolutely perfect, it is all you need to make your knives sharp, it will grow with you as your skills grow.
When you introduce more stones to the process you introduce the possibility of making mistakes and undoing the hard work and progress you made on the first stone.

Take one 1,000 grit stone, whether it is King stone or Naniwa Chosera or Shapton Glass, as long as it isn't a stone you picked up for $7.99 at the hardware store.

Get comfortable with a technique and position that you can easily repeat hundreds of times over and over and develop the muscle memory necessary to achieve truly sharp edges. Don't worry if that takes what seems like an eternity. If you have a 30 King stone and you are not getting the knives sharp enough to slice telephone book paper, don't thank that buying a 1,000 grit Naniwa Chosera is going to  do the trick. It is likely that the stone is not the culprit. Just keep at it and always picture in your head what it is  you are trying to achieve. You are bring the two sides of that knife together at the Apex of the knife perfectly, that is your ultimate goal to bring them together at a microscopically small point and this takes time.

I am learning to play guitar, it is brutally difficult but is all based on building muscle memory, what looks simple on youtube or when my instructor  plays is very difficult for me. However I can see progress and I am not giving up.

What about a coarse stone, something you will find handy to repair an edge like this one. I see these all the time.
What you could do is purchase a diamond plate like the DMT Extra Coarse or the fantastic Atoma 400.
You could use that for two purposes, as your coarse "stone" and also as your stone flattener.

Repairs are not difficult but time consuming and something to worry about later down the road.


You will get to a point where frustration sets in perhaps and you see guys on videos creating beautiful mirror edges that seem razor sharp. What you don't see is the frustrating periods they went through, the mistakes they have made, I've been there.

Remember, at least you are trying and I just can't believe how many people haven't done even that. Or, they try to take the easy way out and just get something you plug in.

Keep up the great work and never hesitate to contact me if you need help.
sharpenerpeter@gmail.com

If you like, you can send me pictures of your work and I would be happy to post them here in my blog with your permission.

Peter