Many hobbyist cooks underestimate the value of a knife’s sharpness. When they first bring a new knife home, they’re thrilled with how well it feels and how well it cuts.

Six months later, they’ve forgotten that feeling altogether and have moved on to more exciting gadgets. A year after that and the knife is now dull as a doornail. The cook wonders why the knives didn’t hold up so well and goes off in search of newer, better knives.

But wait just a minute there! A little maintenance can go a long way toward preserving that “new” feel. Do it right and you can extend the life of your knives indefinitely. Learn about maintenance before you buy knives and you can save yourself a ton of money.

If you want great performance from your knives, look for knives that are sharp and will remain sharp with proper maintenance instead of ones that are “maintenance free.”

Don’t know how to maintain knives? Read on….

Knife Maintenance

Knife maintenance is actually quite easy once you know how to do it. Proper care falls into three categories: cleaning, storage and sharpening. I’ll explain each one in detail.

If you like movies, Alton Brown says it pretty well too. The whole video’s entertaining, but if you only want to see the maintenance part, skip to the 3:31 mark.

Cleaning

Many high-end knives are said to be “stain resistant”, “maintenance free”, or “dishwasher safe”. This means that the steel used in making the blade is durable and corrosion-resistant. Sadly, that construction usually goes hand in hand with “dull”.

Those types of knives might be right for you if you’re adamant about never washing a dish or if you like to leave your knives sitting dirty after you’ve done the food prep. But for those who want high-performance sharp knives, a touch of preventative cleanup is required.

Fortunately that cleanup comes down to one simple rule: hand-clean your knives shortly after each use .

Knives get banged around in the dishwasher. The chemicals in dishwasher detergent can stain and dull your blades. Instead, simply clean the knife gently, but thoroughly after each use and dry it immediately. High-performance knives should never sit in water — this is a surefire way to cause corrosion and dullness.

Storage

How you store your knives is another important factor in how they will perform. Just like with cleaning, it comes down to one simple rule: don’t throw them in a kitchen drawer. Knives are jostled around in a drawer, causing the blades to scrape one another. This results in — you guessed it — dullness.

Better storage options include a wooden knife block or a magnetic knife strip. If you choose a knife block, look for one with horizontal slots so the knife blade won’t be touching anything while stored. If you opt for a magnetic knife strip, you’ll have the added bonus of having your knives on display in your kitchen. Like the look of your knives? Go with the magnetic strip.

Sharpening

Sharpening is yet another important factor in maintaining your high-performance knives. There’s quite a lot to sharpening, but my recommendation is to keep it simple. With that in mind, we’ve got two rules to follow when it comes to sharpening: hone often and let a professional sharpen periodically.

Honing
Many people believe that sharpening consists of rapidly and repeatedly dragging a metal rod across their knife blades. Like many popular perceptions, this is only partially based in truth.

That metal rod is called a “sharpening steel” or a “honing steel”. The latter is a better name, since it’s actually for honing a knife blade and not for sharpening it.

Every time you use your precision knife, you create minor imperfections and bends in your blade. Any one imperfection doesn’t add up to much, but use your knife regularly for a week or two and you’ll start to notice the dullness.

A honing steel, used frequently — after every other hour-long session or so — can help reset these imperfections and keep your knife sharp.

Proper technique is best shown, rather than described so please check out the 5:16 mark of the Alton Brown video above.

Sharpening
Sharpening consists of rebuilding the edge on a dull knife. This is not honing — the repairing of a usable edge. This is something different entirely. Sharpening is an art — a skilled blade worker can restore an edge that is as sharp, if not sharper, than the blade’s original edge.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, sharpening can also damage your knives.

So you’ve got a choice: Get good at sharpening or find a good professional sharpener. I recommend the latter. Sound expensive? It’s not. You can typically have a knife resharpened for less than ten bucks. The trick is to find somebody good.

You can start by testing out a specialty cutlery shop. If they provide sharpening services, try them out with a few lesser knives to see if they know what they’re doing. If they don’t, ask them to recommend someone who does.

Alternatively you can find sharpeners on the web that will accept and return your knives by mail. These sharpeners cost more, since you’ll need to pay for shipping, but you can quickly find some with top-notch reputations and reasonable fees. A favorite of experts is D & R Sharpening.

Whether you choose a local or internet-based sharpener, you shouldn’t be without your knives for more than a week or so. During that week, I recommend you eat out!

If you don’t want to pay to have your knives resharpened, or if you’ve got some time on your hands and want to learn a new skill, you can certainly opt to resharpen your knives yourself. Tread cautiously, though. Practice on a set of knives you don’t mind ruining, and pick up a copy of Dave Martell’s excellent DVD The Art of Knife Sharpening before you get started.

A Word About Cutting Boards

It should come as no surprise, after reading about knife maintenance, that the surface of your cutting board affects how sharp your blades will be. Opt for wood cutting surfaces over ceramic or glass when choosing a board — the latter two surfaces can degrade a knife’s blade dramatically and quickly.