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Sharpening your own knives may seem intimidating, but it’s an economical way to turn what could be junk (your dull knives) into treasure (a new set of knives!).
Manual and electric sharpeners are easier to use than sticks, and the best sharpeners are quick and versatile.
After testing 11 sharpeners and cutting 10 pounds of tomatoes, we believe the Trizor XV Chef’s Choice is the best choice for the home cook. It gently makes the blade of almost all dull knives: Japanese and German, stamped and forged, cheap and expensive.
Reliable, fast and easy to use, the Chef’sChoice Trizor XV provides a razor-sharp edge on virtually any type of knife.
The Chef’sChoice Trizor XV provides the sharpest, smoothest edge of any sharpener we’ve tested. He has repeatedly restored cheap German chef’s knives and high quality Japanese knives from the dullness of a butter knife to the sharpness of a single-cut tomato. Thanks to the detailed user manual and thoughtful design of the Trizor XV, it is almost impossible to mess up the sharpening process – not every competitor can claim this. Because this knife sharpener is easy and quick to use, you will always be able to keep your knives sharp. Finally, the Trizor XV has a powerful engine and a rugged construction for durability. (We already use one in the Wirecutter test kitchen.) It’s an investment, but we think it’s worth it.
The little Work Sharp Culinary E2 outperforms all other sharpeners in its price range. Great for the casual cook.
If you cook occasionally and don’t have many knives, we recommend the Work Sharp Culinary E2 electric cooker. It’s not as fast, powerful, and powerful as the Chef’sChoice Trizor XV, but it’s easy to use and gives a better sharpening than any other sharpener in this price range. We think this will give you the most bang for your buck if you know you only need a sharpener a few times a year.
Idahone Fine Ceramic ceramic sharpening rods are suitable for any type of knife (except serrated knives) and are more gentle on the blade than traditional steel mouthpieces.
Sharpening rods are the best and easiest way to keep your knife blade sharp between sharpenings, and Idahone’s thin 12″ ceramic sharpening rod stands out among the nine models we tested. Its exceptionally smooth surface is more gentle on the blade than other whetstones and works equally well with Japanese and German style knives. Its maple handle is the most comfortable and attractive, and the Idahone also comes with a sturdy hanging loop (handy since the ceramic stem is prone to chipping when stored in a desk drawer).
Reliable, fast and easy to use, the Chef’sChoice Trizor XV provides a razor-sharp edge on virtually any type of knife.
The little Work Sharp Culinary E2 outperforms all other sharpeners in its price range. Great for the casual cook.
Idahone Fine Ceramic ceramic sharpening rods are suitable for any type of knife (except serrated knives) and are more gentle on the blade than traditional steel mouthpieces.
I’ve been sharpening my pocket knives on Arkansas stone since I was 9 years old, and for nearly 20 years I’ve been using my main kitchen knife, the Santoku knife, for shaving with a waterstone and an antique razor sharpener. I really appreciate the finer edges and the stone gives the best quality. But I’m also a fan of “good enough,” which is why I’ve also used electric sharpeners for the past decade on cheap stamped steel paring knives and expensive forged steel chef’s knives. Although they are not as good as stones, the best electric sharpeners produce excellent edges and take very little time to finish. In short: I’m not one of those knife lovers for whom only atomic piercing blades are acceptable. The defining characteristic of a sharp knife is its ability to cut cleanly, easily, and safely, and this can be achieved in several ways.
If you have a knife, you will eventually need to sharpen it. You can get a paid knife sharpening service either with a whetstone or with the manual or electric sharpener we review here. We like these sharpeners because they are more reliable (and more convenient) than sharpening services and easier to use than stones. This means you’ll have a better chance of keeping your knives sharp, which means cooking will be more enjoyable and ultimately safer. A dull knife is a dangerous knife.
We also highly recommend that you use honing rods (also known as honing steels, knife steels or sharpening steels). These are not knife sharpeners, despite what is often thought to be the case. Instead, they help the blade stay sharp between sharpenings, smoothing out tiny dents and dents from daily cutting and grinding. Honing is a simple and quick process – it only takes a few seconds – and can extend the life of a sharp edge by weeks or even months. As such, we consider them a must-have tool for chefs. (Check out our chef’s knife guide for how to use a sharpening rod.)
In this guide, we will focus on manual and electric sharpeners that use abrasives to sharpen knives. Our past tests have shown that the best ones are safe and easy to use, create a truly outstanding blade, and work well with a wide variety of knife sizes and styles.
This means that we immediately ruled out three other types of sharpeners: V-slot carbide sharpeners, whetstones and clamping systems.
While manual and electric sharpeners come in a variety of sizes and designs, there are a few characteristics that we expect all contenders to share:
Ease of use: How easy or difficult it is to use a knife sharpener can be influenced by various factors. Electric models are equipped with powerful motors for quick and easy sharpening. Both manual and electric sharpeners have built-in guides to help you orient your knife and hold it at the right angle. Later, during our testing, another factor came to light: the quality or lack of it in the detailed manual.
A very sharp edge all along the blade: not all definitions of “sharpness” are the same, and ours may fall within a strict range. So, to level the field, we were looking for a sharpener that would consistently produce knives that cut through ripe tomatoes quickly without sawing, tearing the skin or flesh, and without pressing hard on the blade. We are also looking for sharpeners that create a consistently sharp edge from one end of the blade to the other. Depending on what you are cutting, you will use the root of the blade (closer to the hand), the tip, or the entire blade.
Ability to sharpen multiple types of knives: Almost every kitchen has several different types of knives, at least one chef’s knife and a paring knife, as well as usually slicers, boning/fillet knives and butcher knives. We were looking for sharpeners that could handle all of these issues, and more generally, sharpeners that would work equally well for thin, thick, long, and short blades. We didn’t prioritize the ability to sharpen serrated knives—they usually don’t need to be sharpened because they cut with serrations, not just sharpness—but we didn’t stop there.
One thing we didn’t pay attention to was whether the sharpener was German or Japanese, or if the sharpener offered both. In the past, European knives were made from softer steel and sharpened at an angle of about 20 degrees, while Japanese knives were made from harder steel and sharpened at an angle of about 15 degrees. This distinction is no longer relevant: modern alloys, which are now used by knife makers around the world, are usually strong enough to withstand sharp edges, no matter how hard they are. In fact, iconic German knife maker Wüsthof now has a 14-degree edge on its European-style forged blades, which is sharper than the edges used by many Japanese knife makers.
These criteria greatly narrowed our list of applicants. We then spoke with representatives of the few remaining contenders to better understand their technology. We have finalized a team of seven people, which will be tested in 2019.
To test the sharpener, you will need a dull knife. We bought our favorite Mac MTH-80 chef’s knife and our previous budget pick Wüsthof Pro 4862-7/20 (now discontinued). Then we destroyed their sharp factory edges. We first sawed for two minutes on 80-grit paper to chip and bend the edge, then we rounded and rounded the remaining edge by sawing, scraping and twisting the blade on 220-grit paper for another two minutes. We repeat this process after each test to ensure that all of our competitors in the knife sharpener field experience the same problem.
Both of our knives were sharp enough to cut through tomatoes neatly with very little pressure on the blades—their weight alone was enough. We use this as a benchmark for sharpener performance: tomatoes with tough skins and soft interiors quickly expose lower quality edges. A dull knife will flatten them instead of slicing them, and sharp or jagged edges will tear the skin. So, to evaluate the performance of each sharpener, we blunted the knives, sharpened them, and chopped several pounds of plum tomatoes.
We carefully follow the manufacturer’s instructions for each sharpener. Since we completely destroy the edges of our knives before each test, we first use the sharpener in the “Reshape” mode, which creates a completely new edge on the knives, using high-speed or coarse abrasives to quickly remove metal. We then finished each competitor with a sharpening and (if possible) honing, which used a slower speed and/or finer grit to improve the new edge.
In addition, we tested our competitors (not counting sandpaper torture) using knives from the Wirecutter kitchen and several Wirecutter employees – a dozen knives in total, including chef’s knives, paring knives, leather knives and boning knives, were in disrepair . This gave us an idea of the versatility of each sharpener in terms of knife type, but also made the sharpeners work hard, potentially revealing underpowered motors or other imperfections.
In a separate test, we looked at nine honing rods. Honing rods are used to keep the edge between sharpenings; in fact, honing can correct minor edge damage caused by everyday use. Our selection methodology, test protocols and results are described in the Honing Rods section of this guide.
Reliable, fast and easy to use, the Chef’sChoice Trizor XV provides a razor-sharp edge on virtually any type of knife.
The Chef’sChoice Trizor XV is an electric knife sharpener with the sharpest and most stable edge of any sharpener we’ve tested. In addition, it is faster and more reliable than any other sharpener. Thanks to its design, even if you have never used a knife sharpener before, you can hardly go wrong. He repeatedly turned two of our test knives—a $30 German workhorse and a $150 Japanese thoroughbred—from extremely dull to sharp. Its detailed instruction manual clearly explains each step, and its extremely durable construction means you can count on years of performance.
First of all, we chose the Trizor XV for its ability to reliably restore severely dulled knives to extremely sharp edges. Even though we sanded the knife blade, the Trizor XV repeatedly ground cheap Wüsthof stamped steel and expensive Mac forged steel to factory condition, even though they were made from different alloys and had different blade geometries. (Note: XV means 15 degrees, which is the final sharpening angle of the Trizor XV. Trizor refers to the three progressive edges (coarse, medium, fine) created by the machine’s three grinding wheels.)
Just as importantly, the Trizor XV sharpens the blade evenly from root to tip, leaving no blunt marks. In several tests with the similarly priced (and now discontinued) Work Sharp Culinary E3 (the Trizor’s closest competitor in our tests), we got uneven sharpening results with tips that didn’t feel like a blade. The rest are so sharp.
Trizor XV sharpens quickly. It took us up to 4 minutes from start to finish to restore the 8″ dull sandpaper knife to like new condition. Following the directions, we found that each “pull” of an 8″ blade through the sharpener took anywhere from 5 seconds (for coarser grits) to as little as 1 or 2 seconds (for finer “sharpening/polishing”), for a total pull of up to 30 once. By comparison, sharpening an 8-inch knife on the Work Sharp E3 takes at least 5 minutes, and often longer. The total number of jerks is sometimes small, around 20, but since each touch takes about 8 seconds, the total time can be longer if you follow the instructions. Sometimes we do 30 puffs of Work Sharp E3, which takes about 8 minutes, for severely blunt knives. (If you’re running numbers and getting low on results, remember that resetting the blade each time you pull and checking the blade periodically increases the total time it takes to do this significantly.)
One of the reasons Trizor XV produces consistently sharp knives is because of its design, which makes it almost impossible to mess up the sharpening process. Keeping the blade at a constant angle is critical when sharpening by any method: if you don’t, you’ll end up with a rounded, blunt edge rather than the sharp edge formed by two successively beveled points. Like most electric sharpeners, the Trizor XV uses hard angled slots to help guide the blade. But it adds something that others lack: spring-loaded guides in the grooves that clamp the blade at the right angle and keep it from moving while sharpening. The Work Sharp E3 – also the closest competitor in our test – has no equivalent mechanism. Instead, you will have to manually set the angle of the blade in the groove and then manually maintain that angle by slowly pulling the blade through the sharpening element. In our testing, although we were very careful, we found that if you run the blade at the wrong angle or move it to the middle of the stream (because the slot provides room for movement), or the blade gets stuck in the slot and slips to the side, it’s easy to slip and fall. belt. (See the Competitions section below for details on E3.)
The Trizor XV user manual is another plus of this sharpener. Once you’ve used any decent sharpener a few times, you’ll get the hang of it, but the Trizor’s detailed manual will help keep mistakes to a minimum from the get-go. In contrast, the Work Sharp Culinary guide (for all four models we tested) is more basic and needs more detail.
In the end, the build quality of the Trizor XV stands out. It’s a heavy, rugged 4 lb 2 oz unit with a 125W motor and 2.1 amps. By comparison, the Work Sharp E3 weighs 1 lb 10 oz and has an 8.5W 0.7A motor. Our 2016 test model, the Trizor XV, has been used in Wirecutter kitchens for years, and after our official the test of the 2019 device was completed, we used it to sharpen the knives of a dozen employees, working up to 30 minutes at speed. time. It’s not cheap, but if you spend a lot of time with knives in the kitchen, we think it’s a worthwhile investment. (Note: By design, tertiary “grinding-polishing” discs eventually become clogged with metal debris from the knives; they can be repaired or completely replaced using the included mechanism.)
The little Work Sharp Culinary E2 outperforms all other sharpeners in its price range. Great for the casual cook.
If you’re not serious about your knives – if you cook infrequently, don’t have many knives, or just don’t need the best knife sharpener – we recommend the relatively inexpensive Electric Work Sharp Culinary E2 electric kitchen knife sharpener. It’s nowhere near as powerful as the Trizor XV, and nowhere near as fast. But it gives a very good sharpening, much better than other similarly priced sharpeners we’ve tested.
The size of a soda can, the smallest and simplest model in Work Sharp Culinary, the E2 uses a flexible grinding wheel for sharpening and a manual sharpener that uses a smooth ceramic wheel to polish the edge of the blade. Like its big brother, the Work Sharp E5-NH (see competitors), the E2 doesn’t have a Trizor XV spring guide in the sharpening slot, so you’ll have to level the knife yourself. But the simple design of the E2 sharpening pockets makes this pretty easy: their sides are parallel and there’s a little gap between them, so you really can’t really warp the blade. The sides of the E5-NH groove are not parallel and there is a large gap between them, making it easy to move or wiggle the blade while sharpening.
Although the E2′s engine is noticeably less powerful than the Trizor XV’s, we still found it capable of perfecting both cheap stamped steel Wüsthof and expensive forged steel Macs. But due to the weaker motor, the E2 sharpens for a long time, almost 10 minutes, and the Trizor XV – about 4 minutes. To be fair, this kind of sharpening – turning a completely damaged blade into a new one – usually happens once in a lifetime. After this, a quick touch up every few months should be enough if you take good care of your knife. This is the type of sharpening for which the E2 is best suited.
A fairer comparison to the E2 is the hand-operated Chef’s Choice ProntoPro 4643, which typically sells for $50, which is similar to the E2. The ProntoPro (former lockpick) uses a ceramic disk to cut a rather rough, saw-like edge on the blade (to be clear, we’re talking about microscopic “jags”). This blade is great for rough cutting food, just like the teeth of a wood saw are good for tearing wood. In contrast, the smooth edges created by the thin grinding wheel and the E2 honing wheel produce cleaner cuts with less effort. We were even able to peel apples with ease with the sharpened E2 paring knife, which only a very sharp knife with a smooth edge can do.
E2 has one annoying flaw. It has a built-in timer that disables sharpening after 50 seconds (40 seconds for a fast “shape change”, 10 seconds for a slow “sharp”). This is to prevent oversharpening, but there really isn’t enough time to resharpen even a small paring knife, or enough time to reshape a very dull chef’s knife. So you end up turning the machine back on, cycle after cycle, until your knife is sharp. It took us about 10 minutes and 50 “broaches” of the E2 wheel – 25 broaches on each side of the blade, 8 seconds each, plus the time spent checking and resetting the blade between pulls – to get a good edge from the sandpaper – ruined one. (For blades that have become dull from normal kitchen use, we have found that 10 to 14 puffs are sufficient, or a total of 3 to 5 minutes.)
Idahone Fine Ceramic ceramic sharpening rods are suitable for any type of knife (except serrated knives) and are more gentle on the blade than traditional steel mouthpieces.
As we explained above, a sharpener doesn’t sharpen your knives, but it does help keep your blades sharp between sharpenings, so we think it’s useful for most cooks. After testing 9 steel and ceramic sanding sticks, we concluded that the Idahone Fine Ceramic Sanding Stick (12 Inch) is the best for most kitchens. It quickly restored the edges of all the knives we tested, but was more gentle on the blade than other holders we tested. It removes less material from the blade than its competitors, which will help extend the life of your knives.
We use all sharpening rods on several knives, including our favorite chef’s knife. To dull them between tests, we sawed through 1-inch-thick twine several times, a classic task that knife makers use to demonstrate blade durability. We focused on the 12″ blade rather than the 10″ or 8″ models because the longer blade is more versatile and easier to use: it gives you more room to work with a standard 8″ or 10″ chef’s knife (and any smaller knife). ).
We are leaning towards ceramic sticks. They both restore the sharp edges of the old Wüsthof (made from relatively mild steel) and the modern Mac (made from harder steel). They provide very light friction when sharpening, making it easy to swipe the blade in smooth strokes, as you would expect. Steel sharpeners feel smooth by comparison – the blade wants to slide over them, not the sharpener – and are prone to chipping hard modern blades.
But Idahone is significantly thinner than other ceramic rods and delivers the same or better sharpening results with less wear. It also stands out with some nice touches: Its ergonomic maple handle is more comfortable than competing synthetic handles, and its oversized hanging loop is made from durable steel. Other ceramic sticks we tested had smaller hanging loops, plastic loops, or no hanging loops at all. (We recommend hanging any ceramic rods, as the material is somewhat brittle and may shatter or crack if crushed in a drawer or dish holder.)
The only thing we don’t like about the Idahone is that it doesn’t have a protruding finger guard where the stem meets the handle. You can still use it like a “professional chef” by holding the sharpener in one hand and moving the blade towards it, but without finger protection it feels a little dangerous. (We cover sharpening methods in detail in our guide to chef’s knives.) For this reason, we strongly recommend sharpening knives using the safer “fixing” technique, namely: