Sharpening a Knife | Live Free or Die: How to Homestead

One thing that's really important to me in the kitchen is to have all my knives really sharp. So I want to teach you how to sharpen your own knives in your own kitchen.

The first step is to get a sharpening stone. One side with more rough grains, the opposite side has smoother grains. So once you get your hand in the knife set at a certain angle, just keep it at that angle throughout the sharpening process.

I'm just gonna start making circles here, and I'm gonna start at the tip, and I'm just moved to the middle, and then down to the bottom, and then just kind of go back and forth. I'm going to turn to the smooth side and do the same thing in the space like this for a few seconds. At the end, just do one clean swipe each direction.

There's a very shiny sharp knife! You can tell the part that's been sharpened because it's super shiny, looks like brand new metal. Then if you want to test to make sure it's sharp, just rub it on your fingernail for a second. If it easily scrapes off little, little pieces of fingernail dust, then it's sharp and it's ready to use.

So now that I have this knife sharpened, I can go and very confidently use it to cut anything I want to, like meat. Once you learn how to sharpen a knife, it really makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.