[Sca-cooks] A question about knives

[marilyn traber 011221]

> You are right Phlip, I don't understand metal,
> knives etc.  I am still have trouble
> understanding how a 180 degree temperature would
> ruin a temper of high carbon steel.  But as I
> have said, I don't understand metal.

Well, it might help if you think of metal as being very like glass- not truly 
a solid, but rather a very slow moving liquid ;-) Or, perhaps, think of how 
you can stretch taffy a great deal while it's hot, but not very much when you 
chill it down. That's not exact, but rather like _real_ chocolate fudge, the 
texture of the steel varies depending on how the chrystalline structure 
freezes (more or less) in place. Playing with the fudge this spring is what 
helped make sense (to me) of the facts I knew about steel, that needed to be 
absorbed and collated.

> I have retired the Flint knives.  I have said
> so before.  They will always hold a place of
> honor in my house. I am throwing out a lot of
> cheap knives that have collected in this house. 
> Some just are too cheap to hold an edge even 
> after sharpening. 

Yep. But, when dealing with knives, you're looking for a happy medium- hard 
enough to hold an edge, but soft enough to sharpen reasonably easily.

> And your suggestion of purchasing cheap knives
> to avoid "aggrevation" would only avoid cleaning
> aggregation.  It wouldn't avoid the "this is
> so dull it wouldn't cut butter" aggrevation.

Well, the sharpness of a knife, once you have a properly shaped blade for 
your purposes is the responsibility of the owner.

> However, in looking through my lastest Chef's
> Catalog, I see a lot of top brand knives that
> say "dishwasher safe" or "dishwasher safe, but
> handwashing is recommended".  If the dishwasher
> is such a bad thing for kitchen knives, why are
> the manufacturers claiming this?  I bought the
> Shun knives because they said they were
> "dishwasher safe" and because they were more
> affordable and prettier than the Wusthoff and
> Henkle and Dick knives.  They aren't cheap, but 
> just somewhat less expensive.  But then the
> Wusthoff and the Henkle say that theirs are
> dishwasher safe also.  The Dick is the only
> brand I have seen to say "Handwashing only."

It depends on the alloy and the construction. An alloy that is dishwasher 
safe is also going to require a lot of effort to sharpen. My suggestion to 
you, if you want sharp knives that are dishwasher safe, is to get stainless 
steel knives, and a diamond stone and a diamond hone, and learn how to use 
it. You're pretty close to Atar and Oso- I'm sure either of those gentlemen 
would be more than happy to show you how to properly sharpen a knife- and 
they'd likely have some good advice about what sort of knives would suit you.

Sharpening knives is not a big deal- it's something you can do while relaxing 
and watccing TV. My usual habit is to use the hone before and/or after, and 
sometimes during, my usage, depending, of course, how much I'm using it. It's 
not a big production, you just take a few swipes with the hone, and in maybe 
10 seconds, your knife is sharp, and any roughness on the edge is smoothed 
out.

When you actually sharpen your knives on the stone, you can take maybe 5 
minutes per knife to bring it up to a honable edge, once every couple months 
or so, depending how much you use it. It's not rocket science.

Compare it to maintaining a car- yeah, putting gas in it, and maintaining it 
takes a bit of time, but if you don't take the time to gas up occasionally, 
sooner or later the car isn't going to go anywhere. It's the same sort of 
thing.

> And, just to clarify things, the santoku knife
> is _not_ a vegetable knife, any more than a
> chef knife is.  According to Kershaw Shun, the
> santoku in a particular style of knife and they
> offer a separate, smaller vegetable knife, which
> they call a vegetable knife.
> 
> Huette

Well, I'm not involved in that conversation. My interest in Japanese knives 
is pretty well confined to the fascinating methods the Japanese smiths use to 
make them, not the shapes they make the blades.

Saint Phlip,
CoD

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