German kitchen knife, sharpened on 1000 and 3000 waterstones. Straight off the stones it pops hairs and slices paper cleanly. After dicing two onions and a butternut squash it will not bite a tomato skin. That is maybe fifteen minutes of work. I know softer steel dulls faster but this feels absurd. Board is end grain maple, knife is hand washed and dried.
Do you scrape diced onion off the board with the edge? Everyone does it and it wrecks an edge faster than the cutting does. Flip the knife and use the spine. It feels fussy for about a week and then it is just what you do.
Second thing, and it is the one people hate hearing: the squash. Hard winter squash is brutal on an edge, more so than anything else in a normal kitchen, because you push through dense flesh and occasionally catch seed cavity fibres and skin. I would not judge edge retention on a session that includes one.
Agreed, though a properly deburred edge should still slice a tomato afterwards. Both things are true here.
Also worth trying a slightly higher finishing angle on a softer German knife. Around 17-18 degrees per side instead of 15 gives up a bit of initial keenness for a noticeable jump in how long it stays useful. That steel is not hard enough to hold a very acute edge through real prep work.
This plus the deburring together got me somewhere I am actually happy with. Thank you both.
One more variable: is the maple board actually flat, and is it what you always use? A hard, slightly cupped board means you land on the tip and heel first and put all the wear in two spots. My edges lasted noticeably longer after I flattened mine.
@burr_and_edge · 4mo ago · 3 replies
Almost certainly an unremoved burr. Shaving arm hair is not proof of a good edge — a thin flap of deformed steel shaves beautifully right up until it tears off, which takes about one onion.
Test for it: run the pad of your thumb from the spine down over the edge, both sides. If one side feels smooth and the other has a faint drag, there is a wire edge still on it. Remove it with very light alternating strokes on the 3000, dropping to roughly the weight of the knife by the end, then 15 passes on plain leather or even the back of an old belt. The edge will feel slightly less aggressive on arm hair and last ten times longer.
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@grinder_gremlin · 4mo ago
Confirmed — clear drag on the right side. Stropped it out and got through a week of normal cooking before it needed a touch up. I had been treating arm hair as the finish line.
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@nib_grind_nate · 4mo ago
The arm hair test is the sharpening equivalent of judging a loaf by how it looks through the oven door. Cut something fibrous instead — a tomato, or the edge of a loose sheet of newspaper.
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