I’ll be the first to admit I have been a long time skeptic of knife sharpeners. They promise so much and in the end you just feel like you are going through the tedious motions of swiping your knife over and over again to achieve mediocre results. As a professional chef you are taught that the only acceptable way to sharpen your knives is with a wet stone. While stones are effective, they are intimidating and a pain. Is the angle right? Is the stone stable? There is inevitably a bit of a mess too. I end up always procrastinating when it comes to sharpening my knives and hate it because dull knives are dangerous and suck.
So, you can imagine that I was skeptical when I received an email from a knife sharpening company, asking if I would like to try out one of their sharpeners. I was so skeptical in fact that I asked the sharpener to be sent to my parents in NYC. Surely it wasn’t good enough to replace my stone. I’d try it out and then leave it with them.
Then the Work Sharp Culinary’s Work Sharp E5 Electric Kitchen Knife Sharpener arrived. The packaging already set the tone that it was different from the others. My father and I unwrapped it and set it up. The directions were pretty straight forward. Let me preface by saying my father has knives that haven’t been properly sharpened in years. Within 90 seconds these dull virtually unusable knives were reborn. The process of running the knives through the automatic sharpener was so easy that my father became giddy and started digging through every last old knife he could find to sharpen. It was like magic.
It also became immediately apparent that I couldn’t leave my new favorite toy with my loving but unworthy parents. Luckily the sharpener is fairly lightweight and small, so I tucked it away in my suitcase to bring home and promised to bring my WorkSharp Sharpener back to them in New York for the holidays.
And for chef’s with a collection of Eastern and Western knives, don’t fret! They have accessory attachments for all of your needs.
So bye bye stone: you’ll make an excellent door stop.
This is going to be my new go-to wedding gift for the friends I love and maybe, just maybe even my parents.
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