How To Sharpen Kitchen Knives With Whetstones | Fundamental COOKING Skills | Chef Rudakova | Skillshare
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How To Sharpen Kitchen Knives With Whetstones | Fundamental COOKING Skills

teacher avatar Chef Rudakova, Chef & Culinary Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction to knife sharpening

      0:31

    • 2.

      Preparation | Station set up

      1:44

    • 3.

      Step 1

      1:55

    • 4.

      Step 2

      1:15

    • 5.

      Step 3

      2:27

    • 6.

      FAQs and final thoughts

      2:30

    • 7.

      Class Project | Tomato Carpaccio

      3:02

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About This Class

Knife sharpening is the cornerstone of every chef's toolkit, setting the stage for culinary mastery. In this comprehensive course, you'll delve into the art of knife maintenance, honing your skills with precision.

Learn the science behind a sharp edge, ensuring your cuts are effortless and precise. Aspiring chefs, home cooks, and food enthusiasts alike, all took their first step towards culinary excellence by mastering this essential cooking skill.

Course Learning Outcomes.

By the end of this course, you will:

  • Achieve Razor-Sharp Proficiency: Sharpen knives with confidence, transforming dull blades into precision instruments.
  • Enhance Culinary Precision: Experience improved control and safety in the kitchen, as sharp knives reduce the risk of accidents.
  • Know your Whetstones. Know the difference between different whetstones with various grits levels. 
  • Elevate Flavor and Presentation: Craft dishes like a pro with cleanly cut ingredients that enhance both taste and aesthetics.
  • Extend Knife Lifespan: Prolong the life of your kitchen tools, saving you money and reducing waste.
  • Boost Culinary Confidence: Feel empowered in the kitchen, equipping yourself with an essential skill on your culinary journey.

So whoever you are: 

  • a passionate pro-homecook,
  • an aspiring young person considering going to a culinary school 
  • an experienced Chef, wishing to refresh her culinary knowledge & theory

THIS COURSE IS FOR YOU!

I hope you do enjoy it, will learn something new and valuable to take you a step further in your culinary journey, and it will inspire you to continue your culinary education & mastery.

Don't miss this opportunity to master the art of knife sharpening – the foundation of culinary excellence! Take a course now now and start your culinary adventure with a razor-sharp edge.

If you want to advance your culinary skills further: https://academy.theweeklysnack.com/

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Chef Rudakova

Chef & Culinary Artist

Teacher

Hey there,

My name is Natalia, a.k.a. Chef Rudakova. I'm a professionally trained Chef, a Culinary Artist, a YouTuber and a Culinary Instructor.

You might know me from my YouTube channels or Instagram, where I share interesting, fundamental and non-trivial culinary techniques, breakdown various ingredients and explain how these ingredients contribute to cooking recipes.

Teaching & explaining how cooking works is my passion! And, therefore, I've created a series of cooking classes for Skillshare, that can open up a curtain, leading you to an exciting culinary world and make you a great Chef.

If you want to advance your culinary skills further: https://academy.theweeklysnack.com/

You ar... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Introduction to knife sharpening: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you a skill that any professional chef, any serious home book, must know and excel it. I'm going to teach you how to sharpen your knife first, I'm going to showcase you the whole technique and show how to do it. And then I'm going to answer the frequently asked questions. Let me teach you how to sharpen your knife like a professional chef. 2. Preparation | Station set up: In order to sharpen your knife like a chef efficiently, you're going to need at least two wets stones or double sided wet stones like I have with 240 grids and 800 grids afterwards for polishing. Preferably you're also going to have another wet stone with about 6,000 grids. The first thing you want to do with them is to soak them in cold water for at 40 minutes. Once your stones are soaked, you would want to set up your workstation. The first thing that goes on your table is non slip met. You can also use a towel, but it's quite a dirty business. As you can see. You might want to have a special non slip met that you're going to use only for knife sharpening. Next you want to put the stand for your stone. Usually they're sold together with the stones. If you don't have one, no worries. You can put the stone right on top of your non slip met. But I have one. So I'm going to use then we're going to use first the 240 grids stone. And you want to put it right on top and secure it like this so it's not moving. Next step we're going to put a little bit of water on top of the stone. And while we are sharpening, we want to make sure that the stone is always wet, not too much, otherwise everything is going to start moving regardless of the non slip met. And also you want to make sure that your knife is wet. 3. Step 1: Now for every further stage of knife sharpening, and we're going to use the same technique. Take a knife and put it with blade away from you. I know that some chefs use the other way round, but I find this way is better. It's more safe and more efficient. And put it on top of the stone at a 25 degrees angle. Use the three fingers from your other hand and place them in the middle of the knife, somewhere towards the edge, but not too close. Then we can start actually sharpening the knife with back and forth movements like this against the stone. While pressing knife down with your three fingers, but also holding it very strongly with your other hand, making sure that the angle doesn't change. Once you do one part of the blade and you can move on and do the next section, once you sharpened, you went through the whole blade. You also want to sharpen the tip of your knife. And you're going to do it like this by changing the angles, but don't press it too much, otherwise you're going to ruin the tip. 4. Step 2: Place the whole blade on the stone like this and spread your fingers like so. And just sharpen this way, I prefer to do a combination. I first do like this throughout the whole blade, and then I change it up just to make sure okay, one side is done. Now we're going to change the side of the blade, change the hands, and repeat exactly the same thing for the other side. S. 5. Step 3: Now we are done with sharpening the knife on 240 grids stone. Next, you want to switch up your stones and take the 800 grids or I'm just going to switch up the sides like this. Repeat exactly the same thing. Exactly the same knife sharpening technique on this new stone. Okay, finally we're going to move on to the final stage of our knife sharp on, we're going to use our last stone, the 6,000 grid stone, to finish up everything and make our knife smooth and sharp. This one might be tricky, it's a soft stone, and in this case, you would really want to hold your knife in a very, very strong position without changing the angles. Otherwise, you're definitely going to ruin the stone and you want to sharpen the stone itself afterwards. Don't do that. Otherwise you continue exactly the same technique. All right, our knife is done. It's as sharp as it could be. The very, very last thing you want to do, you would want to clean it with soap. Very well, to remove all the stains and all the grids from the wet stone. 6. FAQs and final thoughts: To finalize this knife sharpening tutorial, I would like to answer a couple of frequently asked questions. One of them would be, how many times do you need to do the back and forth motions when you sharpen your knife? Well, that depends on how sharp or dull your knife is. Obviously, the dull it is, the more often you want to repeat these motions until your blade becomes sharp enough. The second question is, how often do you need to sharpen your knife in this manner? This also depends on how often do you use your knife. If you use it every day in your kitchen and you cook three times a day or more, then I would suggest to sharpen your knives like this at least once a week, or maybe once in two weeks. The third question is how to sharpen your stones? How to fix your stones in case you mess them up a little bit. And this I'm going to show you in order to sharpen your stones or fix them up, which you need to do from time to time. You are going to take 1 stone and then you're going to take another one. I'm using 6,000 grids against the 240 grids and you're going to rub them against each other like so. So the 240 degree of 40 grids is sharpening the 6,000 grid stone like this. And now your stones are almost like you and ready to go again. 7. Class Project | Tomato Carpaccio: Oh, to do that. I don't