I’ve learned a lot about knives since I wrote my knife-skills book ten years ago. Most of what I wrote about the dissection of individual food items is still correct, but I would definitely change much of the introductory material. It’s not that it is all wrong, but I would nuance the material much differently if I wrote it today.

Ten years ago I believed that there were machines that could test knives and display a number or printout a reading to say how sharp a knife is. I no longer believe that. Yes, there are machines that can provide a number indicating the relative sharpness of a blade under the test conditions used by the machine. The machine can say that one knife is better than another at cutting a stack of paper or compressing a rubber tube, but that is not an absolute indication of how well the knife will perform in the hands of an ordinary consumer.

Today, I know that sharpness is a relative term. How sharp a knife is depends on who is using it, what they are using it for, and their experience in using a knife in this manner. I have had students tell me how much sharper their knife feels after a basic knife-skills class than before. All I taught them was how to slice with a knife rather than pushing it through the food. The knife was not changed.

When I wrote the book in 2005, I only had a few years experience in using a cook’s or chef’s knife, two of the many names for the same style of knife. I purchased my first one in the summer of 2000 after having spent five weeks staging in Amondans, France. I drove fifteen miles north to a new store that claimed to stock a large assortment of professional knives. The name, Perfect Edge Cutlery, seemed to fit. In those days, the store had one long wall filled with knives being held on magnetic bars. (Now, fifteen years later, the knife display space is almost three times what it was then.) A customer could try any knife on the wall. A saleswomen named Tara let me try a few knives. I decided to purchase a ten-inch long chef’s knife that had an integral metal handle. It was made by a Portuguese company called Icel and cost a little under sixty dollars. It felt better in my hand than the German and Japanese knives I tried. It’s still the primary knife that I use in my home kitchen.

In the intervening five years until the book’s manuscript was written, I bought only one other chef’s knife, a Shun Classic. For a while it was teacher’s pet, but as I used it more and more, it’s shortcomings also came into light. My total loyalty at home went back to my original Icel. Now the Shun only comes out when I teach. My Icel never comes out of the drawer except when I’m the only cook in my kitchen. I can’t replace it in the United States, and it would cost more than sixty dollars to fly to Portugal.

After the book came out, and I was traveling around the United States and Canada teaching and speaking, many manufacturers were kind enough to give me one of their chef’s knives. I can now teach a class of sixteen students and provide each with a ten-inch chef’s knife to use. If they fall in love with the particular knife they are using, it will cost them between forty and three-hundred dollars to have one of their own.

My interest in chef’s knives is not just in it’s use. I’ve tried to determine when the first modern version was made. So far, I’ve narrowed the period to between 1771 and 1856. I’ve learned which features make sense and which only make more money for the manufacturer. I’ve learned the subtle difference between the curves of blades and the angle that the handles make with the blades. I’ve learned the subtle differences between different steels. I’ve learned how different sharpening methods can severely effect the usability of a chef’s knife. I’ve learned that more cooks use chef’s knives than chefs do.

I’ve spent many hours with Mike Solaegui, a commercial knife sharpener serving mostly commercial establishments. We’ve talked about all aspects of knives. I’ve also learned the unique method of knife sharpening he’s developed that is significantly different than the other professional sharpening methods I’ve seen. I’ve watched sharpeners working on flat stones. I seen sharpeners using grinding wheels. In Thiers, France, I saw sharpeners working on abrasive belts. I’ve attempted to find out from each what their sharpening philosophy was and to ascertain how much they truly understood about what they were doing. I’ve learned that each type of knife is sharpened differently, and that the same knife may be sharpened differently for two different users. From Mike, I learned about bad blade geometry introduced by poor sharpening and things like reverse bows and how broken tips can be fixed.

(Mike sells his sharpening system for other sharpeners to use in their businesses. The main system is the Perfect Edge Sharpening Tower. Yes. Although I didn’t meet Mike until about 2008, Perfect Edge Cutlery, the place where I purchased my favorite knife, is his store. Although the commercial sharpening and the equipment manufacturing are separate business, they all originate from the same location and have similar sounding names.)

Part of my quest to learn ever more about knives has taken me to Sakai, Japan, to learn how to make the three, traditional, forged Japanese-knife patterns. There I saw various groups of craftsmen making the different parts of the knives. There I saw that it took four different craft groups to complete a single knife. There I learned how easy it was to sharpen a traditional Japanese knife on a water stone and how difficult it was to sharpen a typical western knife on the same stone.

Early last July, I visited the Ed. Wüsthof Dreizackwerk factory in Soligen, Germany. In contrast to the Japanese craftsmen whose idea of automation was a jig used to make wooden handles, the German factory was a model of efficiency and automation. Industrial robots performed much of the production. Instead of completing a few knives a day like the Japanese craftsmen, the plant could produce thousands of knives, each of very high quality.

After my plant tour, I settled into a conference room to spend a few hours talking with the co-managing director of the company, the export manager, and a man responsible for international marketing. We talked about a lot of knife things, but when we came to the subject of sharpening, there was a difference of opinion. I was trying to explain the dissimilarities between how they sharpened knives and the way knives were sharpened with the Perfect Edge System. I was getting nowhere. So, being the fool for extra work that I am, I promised that I would make a video describing the Perfect Edge Sharpening System. The following video is a result of that promise.

©2015 Peter Hertzmann. All rights reserved.