Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

There are several approaches to sharpening a knife, but all accomplish the same goal: removing material from the blade so that it tapers down to a fine edge. Although <a href="http://amzn.to/VnhKDY">motorized sharpeners</a> do an okay job of this, in practice, waterstones will yield a sharper knife while removing less material from the knife. It&#39;s easy to use a stone to quickly polish a knife to razor sharp before beginning a day&#39;s prep. Moreover, unlike most counter-top knife sharpeners, it&#39;s easy to control the angle of the edge to suit your personal preference.Novices are often intimidated by waterstones; they&#39;re afraid that they&#39;ll either do a bad job or damage the knife. In reality the opposite it true. With waterstones it&#39;s easy to fix even the most badly damaged knife (shown in the video above) or quickly sharpen a knife that just needs a touchup (shown in the videos below).

How to Sharpen a Knife