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Take your best knife out and look at it closely. How sharp is it? Probably not as sharp as you think it is. Here's one of my favorite knives, a Chinese cleaver: Looks pretty sharp, eh? Let's look at
[See the full post at: The Cutting Edge or How Sharp is your Knife?]My husband uses an electric sharpener on our knives. Don't know the brand, but it was recommended by ATK, as I recall.
I have my dad's manual knife sharpening stone. Sometimes I want a knife a little sharper than the electric sharpener makes it. Then I use my dad's stone. Many times he gave me oral instructions on how to sharpen knives while he was working with the stone.
A few years back I was in a cooking store in Pittsburgh and one of the knife makers had a rep there using an electric sharpener, but I don't think they were trying to sell the sharpener, it was rather like taking a knife to a sharpening service, except that it was free. I asked the guy about using a set of whetstones, he said that they're the best way to keep a knife sharp if it doesn't really need a whole new edge.
Not all electric sharpeners work the same way, some are little more than grinding wheels, so basically what they do is build a new edge. If you know what you're doing (and especially what the sharpener is doing) they're good, but I don't think they put as fine an edge on a knife as a series of fine grit stones can. A friend of mine has some $500 knives, I'm going to be seeing him in a few weeks and I'm going to take my digital microscope along so he can see what his knives really look like.
My biggest concern with using them is that they can take off too much metal each time. Unless you use your knives for hours every day, they shouldn't need a serious sharpening more than once every few years.
As I was working on my sharpening post, I spent several days sharpening various knives in my kitchen, including a good meat knife that I hadn't used much lately. Now it works very well, better than my santoku knives for trimming beef. I buy large cuts of meat (almost sub-primals) and trim them down, I get better steaks, roasts and stir fry beef that way and the trim I can't cook with goes in the freezer for the next time I make beef stock.
I was hoping to get some good microphotographs of what impact a sharpening steel and an Accusharp V sharpener have on a knife edge, but most of my knives are pretty sharp at the moment from my work on the 'how sharp' post. So this might have to wait a few months for a follow-up post.
I've been checking other sites that talk about using a sharpening steel, though, and they seem to be split about 50-50 as to whether the steel should move in the direction from the edge to the spine or from the spine to the edge. Might be a good follow-up post here, too.
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