How to Use Knife Sharpening System in Kitchen - Safety Tips

A sharp knife significantly cuts the time you invest in cooking meal for your family. If your kitchen knives have sharp edges then it will easily glide through the vegetables cutting it in the desired shapes and sizes, which will also minimize the risk of cutting your finger in the process. A knife with blunt edge will slip off the vegetable opening a window of opportunity for the knife to cut your finger. Therefore, for your home you need to keep a knife sharpening system to help you keep your knives.

Knife sharpening is a slightly difficult work, and even a small mistake can be disastrous, so you need to pay utmost care when using any knife sharpening system to sharpen your kitchen knife. The safety tips I am going to talk here are sacrosanct for the knife sharpening business as well as scissor sharpening business, so do not overlook any.

Knife sharpening safety tips

Use a sharpening stone or a steel

There are many knife and scissor sharpening systems available in the market, but most of them are not suitable for home use, as they are complicated tools. Those tools are meant to help professional chefs, butchers, or knife sharpening business owners. To sharpen your kitchen tools, you can use a sharpening stone or a steel — a long metal rod with handle used for knife sharpening.

Wear gloves

Wearing gloves cannot eliminate the chances of injury, but it definitely can reduce the chances. Get a protective gloves made up of Kevlar and steel mesh. Do not use kitchen glove, as handling may be a bit of a challenge in a pair of kitchen gloves. I will also suggest you against using any normal plastic or winter gloves for the purpose. It will not help.

Keep it away from your body

It is quite natural to put the thing we are working on close to our body, so that we can exercise more control over it. It may be a good strategy, but not in the context of knife sharpening. Keeping knife sharpening tools close to your body may cause accident.

The proper way to use a steel is to keep it away from your body as well as away from other people, animals or anything which can get affected by a potential accident. Hold the steel in your non-dominant hand and knife in the dominant hand. Run the knife on the steel coming down from top — from away towards you. The angle should be between 10 to 25 degrees.

If you are using sharpening stone then place a stone on a hard surface, preferably on a countertop. The stone should be completely stationary. Keep the stone one foot away from your body, now move the knife towards you on the stone at 10- 25 degree angle.

Go slow

Moving knife quickly against a steel or a sharpening stone is one of the biggest mistake an armature knife sharpener is exposed to. Moving the knife quickly produces bad result, and it may also render the knife useless. And do not talk about the injuries it can inflict. Move the knife slowly. This will keep you in control, all the time.

You should be careful when using any Knife sharpening system or scissor sharpening system, as even a small mistake can cause you physical injury. I would suggest you to take some classes on this, if you have quite a many knives to sharpen, and if you need to sharpen your knives quite frequently.