Do something about this!
A chef came to me with a knife in a sorry state, saying, ‘I’m really struggling here… Can you help me out?’.
This is a type of work called raising Shinogi.
Before it gets to this point, it’s best to regularly sharpen while raising the Shinogi. However, sometimes even when you try to raise it, it just won’t cooperate, or the tip ends up looking like a Concorde plane… When it’s an INOX knife like this, it’s tough to fix manually once it gets to this stage. Kasumi knives are a bit easier since the Shinogi area is made of softer iron, but when it comes to Honyaki… well, you better be ready to go through a whole GC coarse stone just for one knife… In this condition, the blade thickens, and the cutting performance plummets. Looking at this knife, the tip seems narrower than the cutting edge near the base, indicating an increase in thickness. To prevent this from happening, I’m thinking of making a video on how to raise the Shinogi, but explaining it is proving quite challenging… Might need to do some voice-over to get through it… Today, I don’t have time to sharpen this knife, so I’ll start working on it early next week. It looks like I’ll need to sharpen not just from the edge side but also from the spine to get it back to brand-new condition. Should I just focus on raising the Shinogi or go all out and sharpen from the spine as well? Along with this, I’ve got several other knives like the Deba and Maki to sharpen, so I’ll gear up and get to work!
- 2008-08-22
