All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
If you interview enough chefs about their preferred kitchen equipment a pattern emerges: No matter how hard you try to get them to extol the virtues of a particular peeler or spatula, more often than not they declare a good chef’s knife as their favorite cooking tool. Whether you know it or not, your chef’s knife is your most important kitchen tool too. That means taking care of it and keeping it sharp. A pull-through sharpener is a good start; they’re dead simple to use. But to maintain—or restore—the blade your knife came out of the box with, you really need to master the how to use a whetstone and honing steel. Using a whetstone can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Follow the guide below and you can keep your knives in prime cutting shape.
What is a whetstone?
A whetstone, also called a sharpening stone, is made of a gritty material that, when soaked, provides just the right balance of resistance and slip to sharpen a blade. Traditional Japanese waterstones are made from a clay-like stone with a fine, silty grit, but many modern whetstones are made from synthetic materials. The range in grit widely; most that you’ll see on the market begin around 500 and go up to 8,000. The smaller the number, the coarser the stone and the rougher a finish it will leave on the knife.
What is a honing steel?
You might recognize this as “that thing that came with my knife set that is not a pair of kitchen shears.” A honing steel is a metal rod with a handle that you might see chefs running their knives over in cooking shows. While a steel doesn’t actually sharpen your knife, it maintains an already sharp edge. Think of the edge of your knife as an infinite number of separate steel fibers instead of one cohesive surface. As your knife dulls, those fibers start to go in different directions—a steel uses friction to straighten them out, without wearing down the metal. Ideally, you’re keeping your blade sharp through regular honing and then turning to a sharpening method in between.
Why use a whetstone and steel?
Learning how to use a whetstone and a honing rod will give you the sharpest knives with the longest possible lifespan. And while it might sound counterintuitive, the sharpest knives are actually the safest knives. A dull knife needs added pressure to cut, and it slips easily, which can easily mean cutting your fingers. A razor-sharp knife glides exactly where you want it to with ease. Perhaps the single biggest improvement you can make to your cooking is to ensure you have the sharpest knives possible.
How to use a honing steel
- Hold your steel perpendicular to the countertop, with the end resting on a nonslip surface, like a dish towel or wood cutting board.
- Glide the edge of your knife along the steel at a 15-degree angle, from base to tip. Repeat on the other side until your knife feels sharp.
Steel placement: Maybe you’ve watched people hone knives with the steel held out in front of them. It’s both safer and easier to get the angle right to put the tip of your steel on a nonslip surface instead of holding it out.
Speed: “Use a light pressure on the blade and be calm,” says London-based private chef William Cooper. “You see chefs on TV using steels at lightning speed—there’s no need for that,” he continues, explaining that speed is not the level up here. “There’s a good chance you’ll miss a stroke and bang the tip or ding the edge.”
Angle: Not every knife wants a 15-degree angle, but if you’re aiming for between 15–20 degrees, you’re generally okay. Of course, if you have a specialty knife (certain Japanese knives, for example, can be honed at a smaller angle), check with the manufacturer. If you’re unsure what 15–20 degrees looks like, hold the blade of the knife perpendicular to the steel; that is a 90-degree angle. Turn the handle up to cut that angle in half; now you have a 45-degree angle. Turn the handle up to cut the angle in half again; now you have a 22.5-degree angle. Now turn it just a little bit more to make the angle slightly smaller.
I hone my knife every day, but if I’m working in a professional kitchen that day and doing repetitive tasks that might dull the blade, such as jointing chickens or filleting fish, I may hone throughout the day. In a home kitchen, you might find a few times a week is plenty—as soon as you get resistance while cutting through the waxy skin of produce (think tomatoes, plums, peppers) or hear a crunch when slicing scallions, it’s time.
Note: Oftentimes, a knife will only need a few strokes on each side. (Always do the same number on each side.)
Honing steels come in diamond, ceramic, or steel. The steel needs to be harder than your knife—Japanese knives, often the hardest knives, require ceramic steels. You can use a Western chef’s knife on a ceramic steel too, though. So, if you’re choosing only one, go for ceramic. Whichever you choose, don’t bother with a steel shorter than 10 inches. You need a long steel to fit the length of a chef’s knife, and there’s a nominal price increase between 8-, 10-, and 12-inch steels.
How to use a whetstone
- Soak your stone in a tub of cool water for at least half an hour—this gives it the right amount of softness so it doesn’t catch on your blade.
- Place stone on a dish towel so it doesn’t slip around. Keep the tub of water nearby for intermittent dunking.
- Beginning with a stone (or one side of a double-sided stone) with a grit of 1000–3000, place the heel of your knife against the far edge, and, holding the blade at a 15–20-degree angle, slowly drag it toward you while applying light pressure. You should finish with the tip of your knife gliding over the stone—it’s an arc motion, not straight up and down. Continue on the first side until a tiny burr has formed on the dull side of your knife—this could take up to 50 strokes to feel. Then switch sides.
- Repeat on the other side before moving on to a finer grit stone, keeping the stone wet throughout.
- Angle: An angle guide will help you figure out what 15–20 degrees feels like. These either come in little cubes, like this one below from Sharpal, which you prop on your whetstone to get a sense of the angle then remove before sharpening, or, in clip-on attachments that you stay on your knife throughout sharpening. Total beginners: start with the clip-on kind.
2. Grit and gear: Marc Lickfett, founder and CEO of mail-in knife sharpening company KnifeAid, recommends starting with a 1,000 grit stone before moving on. “It is coarse enough so you get the satisfaction of something happening, not too coarse to damage the bevel easily through user error and fine enough to make for a good edge.” Next, go to a 3,000 grit to sharpen. Finally, finish your blade on a 4,000–8,000 grit stone.
After finishing your sharpening on stones, you can move on to polishing your knife on a leather or paper strop, which will give it a mirror-like sharpness. Fun, but not necessary for the home cook. Start with 1 or 2 stones between 1,000–6,000 grit…the deep cuts of knife sharpening Reddit will be there for another day.
1,000/3,000 stone
1,000/6,000 stone
3. Have a practice knife: Do not start with your best knife. “Things will go wrong, and it takes some people a long time to get consistent edges on both sides along the entire blade,” says Lickfett.
4. Watch and learn: A quick YouTube search will offer key visual guidance on the whetstone stroke. I turn back to this video from Cooper for guidance often.
5. Set aside a little time: Expect to spend 20 minutes per knife once you’ve got the hang of it.
Knife care basics
If you’re going to go to the trouble of sharpening your knives with a whetstone (or any other method) you should make sure to treat them well in between sharpening. Remember these basic rules:
- Maintain your blades. Even the fanciest knife dulls; you’re better off with a $40 knife that’s properly cared for than a $400 knife that is allowed to rust or is not sharpened regularly.
- Hand-wash and dry. The dishwasher dulls knives. (Plus, it’s unsafe.) “It’s like putting your soul in there,” says Cooper. Hand-wash gently with soap and water, avoiding gritty scourers, then dry knives before they have a chance to rust.
- Put them away. This is both for your safety and for the continued sharpness of your blades. Store knives on a magnetic strip, in a block, or cover them with blade guards before placing them in a drawer. I tend to not like most blocks—unless they are the perfect fit for your knives, it’s easy to dull your blade tips as they bang against the edges and base of the knife slots. The magnetic stand from Material allows for the same consolidated storage as a block, but without the possibility of dulling tips.
Other knife sharpening methods
While a whetstone and honing steel do the best job sharpening knives, taken together they are also the most advanced method. There are other options that can still do your knives a lot of good and have less of a learning curve.
Manual pull-through sharpener: These are often smaller and less expensive than their electric counterparts. To use, just pull the blade repeatedly through an abrasive slot at the intersection of two metal panels. They offer more control than electric knife sharpeners and require little know-how. Still, it’s easy to take off too much with this kind of sharpener, and you don’t have the flexibility of working different angles for different blades, or sharpening knives with single-edged blades. The resulting edge from a sharpener like this is typically still somewhat rough.
Electric knife sharpener: Electric knife sharpeners often come with two or three slots for both sharpening and polishing and involve the same simple pull-through method as manual sharpeners. Some people worry that the additional power of an electric sharpener makes it more likely you could remove too much steel from a blade, but because they can both sharpen and polish, electric sharpeners provide a smoother finish to your blade. Good electric knife sharpeners will give you a beautifully sharp edge—maybe not brand-new kind of sharp, but sharp enough for most home cooks. We’re partial to models from Chef’s Choice.
(Check out the Epi guide to manual and electric sharpeners if you’d like to learn more.)
Send-in method: This is not exactly a method of sharpening, but as far as the home cook is concerned, the results—sharp knives—are the same. I send my knives to Lickfett’s KnifeAid, which, he says uses “a combination of several methods involving machines, different coarseness of belts or wheels, whetstones, leather, sometimes a hammer and anvil as well as polishing compounds,” to sharpen blades. If you’re properly caring for your knives he recommends a sharpening every six months.
