This site will give you the confidence to choose and use the knives and other nonelectric sharp tools in your kitchen. It’s also a reference site that you can use as you improve your skills and acquire the tools that will make you a better cook!

How to use a whetstone

To sharpen your knife, you must slide the blade on the whetstone at a 22½-degree angle. There’s a trick to figuring out this 22½-degree angle. First, hold your knife straight up with the sharp edge of the blade resting on the stone. This is a 90-degree angle. Tip the knife over onto one side, cutting the 90-degree angle in half. This is now 45 degrees. Then tip the knife again, cutting the 45-degree angle in half, and you’re now at 22½ degrees. You’re ready to start sharpening your knife.

Next is the motion for the sharpening technique. Hold your knife handle in one hand, with your other hand resting on the side of the blade. Slide the knife, from the handle end of the blade to the tip, along the whetstone. Repeat this on both sides until your knife is sharpened. Again, learning the correct motion will take some practice.

While you can get a very sharp edge on your blade, it will never be as sharp as it was on the day it left the factory. You can come close to this edge. But the manufacturing process is too precise to be duplicated.

Finding a 221/2-degree angle — **Finding a** 221/2-degree angle in order to sharpen a knife on a whetstone

Sliding the knife along the whetstone — **Sliding the knife** along the whetstone

Sharpening

Sharpening steel and sharpening diamond steel

A hunter’s knife cannot carve its own handle.

The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.

To start a fight, one does not bring a knife that cuts but a needle that sews.

Tad Williams

He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.

John Owen

Temptation is like a knife, that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his), poison, his exercise or his destruction.

Knife Skills —

a kitchen guide to using the right knife the right way

How to use a whetstone

Tad Williams

John Owen