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Vent: My old lead butcher told me to never sharpen a boning knife past 15 degrees and after 3 ruined blades I finally believe him
When I started at the shop in Bellingham six years back, my lead butcher Ray pulled me aside and told me to keep my boning knives at 15 degrees max. I nodded and then went right on doing what I wanted, which was grinding them down to a super thin angle because I figured sharper equals better. Ruined three good Forschner blades in about four months, all of them rolling over on chicken backs within a week of sharpening. I kept thinking it was the steel or my honing, but no, it was the angle. Ray caught me at the tri-stone one morning and just said, watch this, and put a 15 degree edge on my worst knife in maybe 90 seconds. That blade cut through a whole case of whole chickens the next day without needing a touch up once. I still cringe thinking about the money I torched on replacements. So how thin do you all run your boning knives, or am I the only one who had to learn this the hard way?
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karen_wright401mo ago
Learned this same lesson with garden tools of all things. My grandpa had a beat up old hori hori knife he used for everything, digging, weeding, cutting roots, and he kept it sharpened at this weird blunt angle that drove me nuts. I borrowed it one summer and put what I thought was a proper razor edge on it, and the thing chipped out on the first rocky patch I hit. He just laughed and said the shallow edge was the whole point, it had to give a little on hard ground or it would break. Took me a whole season of ruining my own trowels to get it. Your Ray sounds like he knew exactly what he was doing, and honestly that 90 second demo probably taught you more than any youtube video ever could. Some lessons just cost you money and there's no way around it.
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