Professionally the only time I’d use a ceramic steel would be to get the edge back just long enough to finish a certain job (or switch knives) then sharpen it. Otherwise a smoothly worked steel is all that’s necessary. Kitchen knives go through far more abuse so I can see how it might be useful.
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Hi Pertti,
bit the bullet.
I just ordered two diamond “stones” (solid silver), one 400, the other 1000, a box mount with a base that serves as a strop, an angle guide, some green stropping compound
for $21.00
The next step will be the shopton 2000 . . .
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There is so much misinformation here.
A ceramic rod sharpens because it’s abrasive. So do steels, if they have ridged or coated textures.
Smooth steels, glass rods, even brass rods, will realign an edge. They needn’t be harder than the blade to do that.
The problem with very high RC blades is that the edge is quite brittle, not in the the softness of the steel used to “hone” it.
The only way to “ruin” one of these edges on a softer rod or steel is to use too much pressure or bad technique. What happens is that–seeing no improvement–the person presses harder, oftentimes past the point where the edge will chip. It used to be the mark of a good blade was that it would deflect under pressure from a brass rod and NOT chip. Now, suddenly, it’s the rod’s fault?
Steels and rods work well mostly because of the very high effective PSI inherent in scraping one tiny area (the point on the edge) against another (the point on the rounded area of the rod). For any given perceived pressure, running a blade along a steel is effectively much greater than running it along a stone or platen.
Here’s some astounding late-breaking news: Cutting things wears knives. Lettuce does it, wood does it. Brass does it. “Softer” steel does it, too. Hell, if you have enough time and/or pressure, water will do it.
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@kaleokahu - Yeah it depends on the steel. A smooth steel only straightens the edge. It is not an abrasive. Other steels with deeps ground lines are a waste of time and damage the knife’s edge. There’s a market for them and ceramic for some people but not in my professional past or now.
No, there is abrasive wear going on. Just not very much. If you’re a professional user (steeling 4-5x/shift), the less abrasive wear the better, consistent with keeping the edge polished and aligned. You probably want what the makers call a “polished” steel, which still burnishes by removing a little material.
But these are only a small part of the selections of steels. The majority are grooved/fluted, even if you can’t see the fluting. F. Dick breaks the grades of cuts, i.e., the degree of abrasion down to High Abrasion (coarse and regular cuts), Low Abrasion (fine, superfine, and Saphhire cuts), and the polished. They also do diamond and ceramic.
F. Dick puts it better than I can: “F. DICK sharpening steels are available with different cuts. The cut, also called fluting, determines the surface quality and the abrasion on the cutting edge of the knife. We offer different sharpening steel cuts depending on the desired material abrasion. The more often you sharpen your knives on the sharpening steel, the longer they will stay sharp with maximum edge retention.”
“A certain surface and roughness on the sharpened cutting edge is obtained depending on the coarseness or fineness of the sharpening steel cut. The extent of the surface roughness is a result of the grooves created during the sharpening. The grooves are transverse to the cutting edge when sharpened correctly. A cutting edge profile with more or less pronounced serrations (saw-like) is formed on the cutting edge itself at the point that the grooves from both sides of the knife meet, depending on the depth of the grooves.”
I defer to you for your experience and stick to mine own. The vast majority of people don’t know how to steel a knife anyway and that includes Gordon Ramsey when I see him doing it at the start of his shows. 
If an edge is bad enough to resort to a ceramic or a deep grooved steel then it needs to be sharpened or swapped out. That’s not exactly practical for a kitchen but it is certainly the case for professional meat cutters where a knife is their bread and butter.
Hear, hear!
So much of this “steel” debate is about nomenclature and taxonomy. Is a given method or degree of abrasion ‘sharpening’, ‘honing’ or ‘polishing’? There’s one here who maintained for years that a leather strop loaded with 30k diamond paste is all the sharpening he needed. I wouldn’t call that sharpening, but it is causing some abrasive wear.
I worked in my dad’s packing plant growing up. Our butchers and killfloor operators didn’t have the luxury of being able to swap out their knives, and only carried a few in their scabbards. So they almost universally carried steels that had some appreciable degree of cut; some carried 2 steels. These were personal blades, and the owners had access to a Hook-Eye if they wanted to regrind–off shift.
But this was before cheap hollow ground knives and sharpening services like Nella took over. Now I think institutional meatcutters’ knives are treated as disposable.
Let me ask you this: Do you bone out front quarters by hand? What knives do you use for that, and how does steeling those boning knives differ from the way you do other knives?
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I was assigned to ham boning so always used a boning knife on the hams and picnics. We’d lop off the tip so the overall length was ~4.5 inches. I had enough time to avoid the kill except for about two weeks in the summer during layoffs rather than take unemployment. In the kill I split ‘em with the hanging circular saw. [I went into the service to finally escape the packing house; afterwards I finished schools then started my own career path.]
Cheers
Interesting. When you were boning hams, were your knives personal to you, or did you just grab from a box when you needed a fresh one? My dad’s crew favored Forschners, back when they weren’t cheap or plastic.
Yes, Cheers!
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The storeroom would give us up to three knives a month but we had to return the used knife in order to get the replacement. We could pick from Chicago, Forschner, and Dexter. I used Dexter as did about 50% or more of the department. The majority of the reminder used Forschner but some liked Chicago. We had about 100 people in the department spread across three lines.
Everyone obsessed over their steel and knife. The slightest drag in the meat can’t be ignored unless its near the end of the shift and you’re close to hitting standard. But nothing sets someone into a rage more than hitting your mesh glove.
A well worked steel can bring back a good edge after a minor hit of the bone, cutting board, or arm and belly guard. Hitting the mesh glove however leaves no alternative but to change knives or making a trip to the grinding room.
I lasted five years which was four too many but a great life experience.
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Hi, RD,
Alton Brown agrees with you about honing. See 4:40
Ray
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Alton is the man, I think. He has so many great tips. One of the very best I saw (as common sensical as it is) is how to dry a knife. Lay a folded towel on a surface, lay the blade on the towel and fold the remaining piece of towel over the opposite side of the blade and draw the knife out. Why it took me so long to learn that is unknown.
I don’t own any expensive knives but my four favorite are kept in a drawer. The rest are just throwaways kept on magnetic strips.
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Hi, RD,
The steel Alton demonstrates in his video is the one I own and use. It’s grabbable–located in it’s own slot–right in front of me in my kitchen.
Ray
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Not especially about cutlery, but hey, he speaks the words he’s paid (in this case by Shun) to speak.
That s a great way to dry a knife. My only problem with it is that if you are flying around the kitchen that method either requires you to go back and forth to wherever the towels is lying or stop and fold the towel if you brought it with you. I just tuck a towel in my apron as I move through prep. As long as my knives have bolsters (they do) I can make a quick wipe safely.
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I know Alton says it is a honing steel, but it sure looks as if it has an abrasive surface on the side. Beware!
Alton says a lot of questionable things. For instance, in the linked video, he says bamboo cutting boards are kind to knives.
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It has a smooth metal surface part that does not remove material–I have one and it works fine.
Ray
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Well, they do make a disquieting clacking sound.
With hard German steel and even harder Japanese VG10, home users like me were taught by Wusthof to regularly align with very light honing–occasional light sharpening with a pull through.
As usage varied at home, there were other remedies possible that used a steel with grooves–or a ceramic hone–to do more than simple re-alignment.
Until I switched my maintenance to the use of a loaded strop, these tools were my go-to bag of tricks–still used for my Wusthofs from time to time.
