Care & Sharpening

Three rules cover almost everything: wash it by hand, dry it straight away, and keep it off anything harder than wood. The rest of this page is detail.

Washing

• Hand wash only. Not one knife in this range is dishwasher safe. Dishwasher detergent is abrasive and alkaline — it dulls the edge and works on the micarta — and blades knocking against a rack chip.
• Dry it immediately. X50CrMoV15 is stainless, not rustproof. Left wet, and especially left wet with salt or lemon on it, it will spot.
• Do not soak it. Water sitting in the join between scale and tang is the one place on this knife that will not dry on its own.

Boards

Wood or plastic. Never glass, stone, ceramic or a steel worktop — one pass on any of those undoes a sharpening, and a hard landing on stone will chip an edge ground to 15 degrees. End-grain wood is kindest; bamboo is harder than it looks and dulls faster than people expect.

Honing, and what it actually does

A honing rod does not remove metal and does not sharpen. What makes a knife feel blunt after a few weeks is usually the very edge rolling over to one side. A rod pushes it back straight.

Six light passes a side, at roughly the angle the knife is ground to, once a week. Light means the weight of the blade. Leaning on it bends the edge the other way.

Do not use the rod on the Bread 220. Serrations have nothing to straighten.

Sharpening on the stone

1. Soak the stone for ten minutes, until it stops giving off bubbles.
2. Start on the 1000 side. Hold the blade at about 15 degrees — two coins under the spine is close enough — and draw it along the stone edge-first, heel to tip, in overlapping passes.
3. Work one side until you can feel a fine burr along the whole length of the other. That burr is the signal; without it you are polishing, not sharpening.
4. Turn it over and do the same, then alternate single passes to take the burr off.
5. Move to the 6000 side and repeat with much lighter pressure to polish the edge.
6. Rinse, dry, and stand the stone on edge until it is completely dry.

A dull but undamaged chef’s knife takes about five minutes. If the edge is chipped or badly rolled, a 1000 stone will get there eventually but a coarser stone around 400 grit will get there in a fraction of the time.

What needs what

The serrated knife

A serrated edge cannot be sharpened on a flat stone, and running a rod along it only rounds the points. Each scallop has to be worked individually with a tapered rod, which is a fiddly job and not one we sell a tool for. On home use a bread knife lasts years before it needs it. When it does, a specialist sharpener will do it, or you replace the knife. We would rather you knew that before you bought it.

The handles and the roll

Micarta needs nothing. If it looks dry after a few years, a wipe of any food-safe oil brings the colour back. It will darken with use and that is not a fault.

The waxed canvas roll is brushed clean and spot cleaned with cold water. Never machine wash it — that strips the wax and it stops being water resistant. Do not roll damp knives into it.