Knife Sharpening vs. Honing - What you need to know

Hello. Hello. I'm Natasha Ho. Welcome to The Dish. And I'm just about to head out to get some knives sharpened, and it reminded me that this is a topic I wanted to talk about here with you all: Getting Knives Sharpened.

And specifically, what's the difference between sharpening a knife versus honing a knife? Now, a lot of people have a device that looks a lot like this at their house, and they will refer to it as a knife sharpener, which it usually is marketed as a knife sharpener, but it's a bit of a misnomer because what it doesn't actually sharpen your knife.

So let's talk about difference between sharpening a knife versus honing a knife. So when you are sharpening a knife, what you are doing is you're changing the actual structure of the blade.

You'll often be removing some of the metal in order to make the blade sharper on a microscopic level.

So you're trying to align all of those little metal molecules in a straight line so that the knife will become incredibly sharp and be able to slice through anything. On the other hand, when you are honing a blade, you're not going to be removing any of the metal from the blade. You're not changing the overall structure of the blade.

What you're trying to do is realign the molecules of metal into a straight line. So over time, as you're chopping and slicing and dicing, the metal will start to become misaligned.

Some of those molecules will start to kind of get pushed here and there by the impact with the food that you're cutting. And so when you hone it, you basically use pressure to push all of those molecules back into alignment so you can elongate the life of the blade, the sharpness of the blade over time by honing in between your sharpening. So using something like this, you can make the amount of time that you have between sharpenings much longer because you hone it between each of those uses.

And then when it is actually not able to be sharpened by honing anymore, when you've really lost the edge on your blade,  then you can take that to a knife sharpener. And they will sharpen it for you. Or if you feel comfortable doing it at home, you can do that as well.

​But you don't need to sharpen as frequently honing something that you would do regularly. But sharpening. Most people only need to do that a couple of times during the year in order to keep a good edge on their blade.

So I wanted to explain what the differences between those two things, because a lot of people mix those two things up. And you might think you've been sharpening your knife all this time when what you're actually doing is honing it, and your knife still needs to get a good sharpening. So make sure that you check your knives. We always want to have very sharp knives in the kitchen. I always say a sharp knife is a safe knife.

I'll see you guys here next time. Bye.