care and keeping of sharps

I'm back to cooking blogger mode to talk about my favorite tools in the kitchen: knives. A good, sharp knife is necessary to divide large food into smaller, manageable chunks. Or bites. Or bits. Knife skills are a cornerstone of cooking and you can't get around it unless you want to buy pre-cut frozen everything for the rest of your life, and of course you don't because your freezer barely holds three frozen pizzas and a handle of vodka half-filled ice cube tray. So to move forward, you'll have to follow me into the danger zone.

Unlike this guy, I am not responsible for any training accidents.

First thing, I need you to get over your fear of cutting yourself. It's a childish fear that was instilled in you at a young age and you just need to grow up. Just kidding. Cutting yourself can seriously slow down or even halt a meal production and you need to be careful. What you really need to remember is you are less likely to cut yourself with a sharp knife than a dull one. Dull knives require more force to use, and the blade can deflect sideways right into the fingers you were hoping to keep scar-free. Less force, greater control, less time and human-blood-free meals. That's a win-win-win-win. To keep them sharp, you'll need a honing steel.

Listen to Alton Brown explain how use a honing steel in less than one minute:

Did you hear what he said at the end? Leave sharpening "to the professionals", if you can. Commercial "sharpeners" will ruin your knives. If the honing steel isn't working anymore, or you've chipped a blade, a whet stone sharpening kit is the only way to properly sharpen a knife at home. Remember, a sharpener removes metal, so the more you use it, closer you get to having to replace a knife (which isn't terrible, I love knife shopping.) This video is a perfect demonstration of the technique.

The next part of taking care of your knives is the cutting surface. Never use a glass or stone cutting board. Those materials are too hard and will dull or even blunt your knives in a very short time. Wood cutting boards are the best, but they get a bad reputation because they are porous, and that supposedly makes them unsanitary. That is a myth, and lifehacker.com can set your mind at ease: "there's no significant antibacterial benefit from using a plastic cutting board over a wood one." My personal favorite (because I have very limited counter space) is my 18.5"x12" plastic Architec Gripper cutting board, which is big enough to lay across my sink or stove top and doesn't slide around because the bottom is covered with rubber feet. (Unfortunately, it appears the company only makes up to an 14"x11" size now.)

Lastly, the Dos and Don'ts list:

• Don't keep your knives in a drawer where they will rub up against each other. Use the a knife block or magnet strip for storage.
• Do check your handles for cracks, especially after dropping them, as the blade could come loose on some knives.
• Don't buy "miracle" blades or any other cheap "As Seen On TV" knives.
• Do consider knives an investment and look to spend about $80-100 on a good set. They will last forever if you take care of them.
• Don't leave your knives soaking in water and do hand wash them right after each use. The blades can rust if left in water, and a dishwasher detergent can damage blades and wooden handles.
• Do read the appendix if you have specific questions about what knives to look for.

Summary Appendix of Knives

This Wikipedia article covers at least twenty times the technical information about knives than I am going to cover here. If you rather skip my terrible jokes and movie references, you can read it instead and be a knife nerd like me. Consider this the TL;DR summary.

The first sharp knife anyone knows is the Chef's knife. This is the knife that your grandma used to chop carrots for stew, your dad used to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving, and last thing Janet Leigh saw in "Psycho." You know, your all-purpose knife. Professional chefs will spend hundreds of hours practicing with this one knife and will use it for almost everything. It can be intimidating and unwieldy for beginners, but it will get you through more meal preps for less money than any other knife.

However, the Chef's knife is falling out of style in some American kitchens and being replaced by the fancier sounding Santoku, or "three uses" knife. The three uses are slicing, dicing and mincing; that is cutting vegetables into big pieces, small pieces, and little bits. A few knife sets now have this knife instead of a Chef's. But, then what do you use for meat?

A boning knife. This is usually the first knife you reach for to open a letter or use as a screwdriver. It can also cut raw meat better than most any other knife. Boning knives have a fine curved tip, and assuming you haven't already forgotten what I said about sharpness, it will separate skin and bone from your meat products more easily than a Chef's knife because of the short, slender blade.

A standard set of kitchen knives comes with a bread knife, but you need it only for soft bread. Sure, its 10 inch serrated edge seams to be designed for sawing through the outer crust of artisan breads, but I've found a sharp straight edge will cut baguettes and bagels more cleanly. The bread knife is designed for soft homemade bread and rolls; hard crust or dense breads have the structure to resist squishing under the additional pressure required by straight edge knives.

The last essential is the paring knife. This is a mini-Chef's knife used to cut fruit and remove seeds. Sometimes called a peeler, the knife is also used to make garnishes and cut cheese. Its name is linked to where we get the word "pre-pare", as in to cut away unwanted bits from food before it is served. Get into the habit of saying you are "preparing" the food instead of "making" it; it sounds better and reminds you that this food will be presented to others and they damn well better respect your efforts.