How To Keep Your Serrated Knife Razor-Sharp Without Ruining It

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With proper care and maintenance, your quality kitchen knives really can last a lifetime. While you may be familiar with using a whetstone to keep your chef's knife in tip-top shape, that serrated knife always feels like another story. Some folks may be stuck in the "I'll just buy a new one" mentality, but restoring your serrated blade to its former glory can be done fairly easily with a little bit of patience and the proper tools.

Your serrated knife typically needs less attention than your chef's knife or paring knife, as a large proportion of the blade is kept from hitting the cutting board and mostly works through food stuffs. However, when it does need sharpening up, you're going to want to use a honing rod. Honing is different from sharpening: while the latter is intended to remove metal, honing is done fairly regularly as a way to realign edges so they stay at peak sharpness. There are steel hones which work better for softer knives, and diamond coated rods which can be used for dull knives that need actual sharpening, but ceramic rods are excellent for regular maintenance. Ceramic honing rods are harder than most steel knives by upwards of four times, ensuring that they will work for pretty much anything you've got in your knife block.

Once you've got a honing rod, it's easy to restore your serrated knife to its intended greatness. Holding the rod in your non-dominant hand, place one of the scalloped edges of the beveled side of the knife on top of the rod at a 20 degree angle and apply light pressure to the knife. You might try placing the end of the rod on a table to steady your hand. As soon as you start sliding the knife slowly back and forth across the rod is when the correcting begins. While it's not difficult work, you will need to do four or five strokes per ridge, slowly working your way down the knife. This works to correct imperfections, which will appear as burrs, or little ridges of metal that will then need to be sloughed off. 

After each serrated edge has been hit with the honing rod, take the flat side of the knife and slide it across the rod or flat over a whetstone to remove the burrs. As chef Masaharu Morimoto exclusively told Mashed, doing this regularly is essential to keeping your knives in fighting shape. Perhaps this all sounds like too much of a hassle. In that case, there are some electric knife sharpeners that can work on serrated knives. The Chef'sChoice Knife Sharpener, for example, has a slot with stropping disks that can get into those hard to reach nooks and crannies.