How to Sharpen a Knife with a File

One of my most hated things in the kitchen is trying to cut with a dull knife.
Second only to trying to cut with out a knife.

Yes cutting with your fingers just doesn't really work

Tomatoes shouldn't be this difficult to cut….

So If you're knife is behaving something like this….. Ya know it's time to whip it back into shape.

Aka sharpen it.

Now a common misconception is this honing steel will sharpen your knife..

Which isn't really true. It basically just maintains the sharpness of an already sharp knife.

Swiping a few times before or after using your knife each time… will help keep a knife sharper longer.

But if you're precious knife has been neglected I'm going to show you how to easily sharpen it using a file.

As you can see here I have a fine toothed wood file…. Ya don’t want anything too crazy…

And what I'm gonna do is clamp it to my desk using this C clamp….. It will make this whole process much easier

So in order to sharpen this knife properly I have to do it at the right angle…. which should be around 20 degrees….

And if you're like me and remember nothing from math class I have cool little trick

Basically take a square piece of paper like this … one side is a 90 degree angle…. Half that… is a 45 degree angle…

And half of that …… is 22.5 degrees …. Which is basically the degree we want to sharpen our knife at…

Now I can use this as a guide.

Ok. basically I'm just gonna start striking the entire length of the cutting edge…. Heel to tip… or tip to heel…

I don’t think it really matters…

I alternate sides. That way I'm not sharpening one side more than the other….

But with my file…. There is a pattern … and I have to go against the grain… not with it….

Which as you can see is why I’m going heel to tip on one side, then tip to heel on the other

I can feel that one side of my knife seems to need more attention than the other…..

I basically just continue to do this until the knife is sharp.. Checking it periodically..

As I do this… bits of steel come off which I dust off with a wife brush…

Aright…. I think this thing's pretty sharp… let's test it out.