Food - Drink
Is There An Easy Trick For Sharpening Serrated Knives?
By HALDAN KIRSCH
While serrated knives don’t get as much credit as the all-purpose chef’s knife, a good serrated cutting tool is often the best and only option for certain kitchen tasks. To keep your serrated knives sharp so they can cut through bread, layer cakes, and delicate produce with ease, make sure you sharpen them properly.
Serrated knives dull more slowly than other tools, and it can be hard to tell if they need sharpening. If you’re worried about your serrated knife, try using it to slice bread; if your knife struggles to do this and creates a lot of crumbs, you should use a honing rod, which is the easiest "trick" for sharpening your serrated blades.
A honing rod is more effective than sandpaper, but simpler than using a high-end knife sharpener. To use the rod on a serrated knife, you need to sharpen the side of the blade that is "beveled"; one side should appear flat, while the other has an angled cut taken out of it, and the latter side is the beveled one.
Once you've figured out which side is beveled, run the honing rod along each "gullet," the sharp little peaks and valleys that make the knife serrated. Once that's complete, run sandpaper or the honing rod across the other side of the blade in the opposite direction, to remove any metal burrs created during sharpening.