Do you not sharpen them in between? I've had to spend hours sorting out knives that have been left far too long without sharpening, but my routine is to spend about 15 minutes sharpening them every weekend. Then they're always sharp and never get into a terrible state and need remedial work.

My knives get noticeably suboptimal in a couple of weeks without sharpening, so if I left it 6 months they'd be blunt pretty much all the time.

So this I understand for sure. If it is a relaxing thing for you, cool. There are plenty of things I do by hand for the same reason.

The people I worry about are the ones stropping a single knife 6000 times because they think it truly matters to cutting tomatoes

Buy one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/ChefsChoice-EdgeSelect-Professional-S...

But you have to let go of the "ruining it" fear. Sharpening a knife does ruin it, you're taking off a tiny amount of material each time. Since your knife is full bolster, you'll eventually notice a small difference in height of the blade at the bolster.

Yes you will ruin the knife over decades of sharpening. In the mean time you have a wicked sharp knife that's a joy to use (not just look at). It's a tool not an art piece.

Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.

Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.

Knives get stupid beyond a certain price point.

I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.

Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.

There are lots of great knife makers. Depends on what you want. Knives become about aesthetics and feel pretty quickly, price point wise. Not cutting functionality (ease of cutting, whatever).

Victorinox knives rank very well in just about any real-use ranking I’ve ever seen and are extremely affordable. If you just want good knives that will serve you well, won’t break the bank, and you won’t feel bad using them, that’s what I would do. There are other good recommendations in the thread as well.

As for custom steels - outside of currently very expensive processes (powdered metallurgy, etc), it is basically “maximum sharpness”, “edge retention”, “ease of sharpening”, pick maybe two. Edge retention here is shorthand for both brittleness (chipping) and abrasion resistance (regular wear), even though they differ for some things.

High grade carbide, for example, is extremely tough and resists edge abrasion. But because of the large grain size it is ~impossible to get it as sharp as carbon steel by hand. Additionally, the same abrasion resistance also means you need something hard enough to sharpen it.

If you remember those little scratch kits you may have played with once in science class as a child where you tried to see which rocks scratches other rocks, this is the practical application of that.

Even in metalworking people will often make or use hss cutters when they need something really really sharp or custom. Or just cheap. And use carbide ones when they don’t. Because you really can’t get carbide as sharp as HSS and sometimes it matters. I can also easily make a really good HSS cuttter, but making a really good carbide one would take significantly more expensive tooling and time.

This is one example.

Ceramic knives[1] tend to have very high edge retention, but are very brittle and fracture easily. So it's very easy to nick them. This makes them last forever if you are slicing but not if you are chopping. They are also ~impossible to sharpen without diamonds.

In the end - we can construct steels and other things with very nice properties at high cost, and it's cool and fun to explore the limits there, but it’s not going to make you a better chef, or make your prep 10x faster or whatever. This isn't to say it's completely impossible to make somethign that is awesome at everything, but we use what we use because we can make them without nudging atoms into a matrix one by one :)

So while it's possible to get 5x the edge life out of an impossible to sharpen knife (for example), for most people, it's not worth it. They don't even notice once the novelty wears off.

[1] Tungsten carbide is really a ceramic but people often mistake it for a metal/steel, when in reality it's often just alloyed/glued/etc to metals, etc. Assume i'm not talking about tungsten here.

You know you can buy a <$5 gadget you drag the knife across a few times for 10s that gets it about 95% as sharp as a professional job? Zero skill or attention required.

Dont have time in your schedule...jeeze. Sounds like learned helplessness to me. That or spoiled rotten. The comments in this thread help me understand the general animosity towards the tech industry from much of the population.

> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.

Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.

Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.

If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.

Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.

In Japan I could just drop my knife in a nearby house's box with $6, they'd sharpen it and phone me to pick it up within a few hours. Cheap enough that I never bothered to do it myself.