Hi all!
Apologies in advance if this is an inappropriate topic for the forum - I honestly don't know if sharpening knives are things that chefs do, or if they just send it to the shop so they can focus more of their time on actual cooking/prepping.
But in the event that sharpening is a daily part of your routine, I wonder if my limited rookie experience is familiar to yours, or if it's just me.
I use a series of whetstones, on my set of Globals and Dexters. The whetstones have the following grits: 180, 600, 1000, 3000 and 8000.
I generally start off with 600 as my coarse grind. I usually get a pretty good result from there on. I run my fingers perpendicular to the blade, and I feel a very reassuring bite. No problems there. The problem is when I jump to the 1000 grit, for some strange reason, I lose that feel! On a technical perspective, I am going to a finer stone to begin polishing the blade. I have not changed the grinding angle (not intentionally anyway). Eventually I give up and give it a few more rubs with the 3000 followed by the 8000. At this stage, I rub my knife along my forearm like a razor, and do observe a few hairs come off. Nowhere near as good as a razor, but still reasonably sharp. When I do that finger print test, my thumb simply rolls off as if it was a blunt knife though.
Can anyone suss out what I'm doing wrong? I know it's probably pointless having a razor sharp knife (would go back dull after a few uses), but I have a lot of time to resharpen regularly, and really appreciate maximum sharpness.
Apologies in advance if this is an inappropriate topic for the forum - I honestly don't know if sharpening knives are things that chefs do, or if they just send it to the shop so they can focus more of their time on actual cooking/prepping.
But in the event that sharpening is a daily part of your routine, I wonder if my limited rookie experience is familiar to yours, or if it's just me.
I use a series of whetstones, on my set of Globals and Dexters. The whetstones have the following grits: 180, 600, 1000, 3000 and 8000.
I generally start off with 600 as my coarse grind. I usually get a pretty good result from there on. I run my fingers perpendicular to the blade, and I feel a very reassuring bite. No problems there. The problem is when I jump to the 1000 grit, for some strange reason, I lose that feel! On a technical perspective, I am going to a finer stone to begin polishing the blade. I have not changed the grinding angle (not intentionally anyway). Eventually I give up and give it a few more rubs with the 3000 followed by the 8000. At this stage, I rub my knife along my forearm like a razor, and do observe a few hairs come off. Nowhere near as good as a razor, but still reasonably sharp. When I do that finger print test, my thumb simply rolls off as if it was a blunt knife though.
Can anyone suss out what I'm doing wrong? I know it's probably pointless having a razor sharp knife (would go back dull after a few uses), but I have a lot of time to resharpen regularly, and really appreciate maximum sharpness.