Flipping Blade for Longevity?

[JimmyJoeMeeker]

It is for a lot of people. If you watch them, they literally attack cutting boards.

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I like a sharp knife but I don't particularly care to sharpen knives.

Here is a photo from last November. I was doing some prep for the salad station I was running. I like to cut on a towel. It keeps everything in place better and the knife edge off of the cutting board underneath.

True about the steel. I was showing this to the guy next to me at the fry station who does appetizers.

After using the steel, I wiped the blade and showed him the metal residue. One of the "cooks" was laughing because I was using the steel because the restaurant has a sharpening service and thought what I was doing was funny.

People would be surprised how that very sharp edge gets our of wack just cutting vegetables. The skin on cucumbers is very tough. If you don't keep a sharp edge on your blade, they become difficult to cut through.

I'm definitely a sharpening nerd.

I'm impressed by your knife work on that cucumber. Achieving that level of neatness and uniformity would take me 45 minutes. I'm guessing I'd get moved to dishwashing pretty fast at that rate.

My wife goes at the cutting board like Paul Bunyon. I don't leave my good knives where she can grab them. They get put in a roll and stored out of the kitchen. I have at least finally gotten through to her about using the spine, and not the cutting edge, to move things around on the board. I cringe every time I see somebody do that.

 

[ShavingPrimate]

I have at least finally gotten through to her about using the spine, and not the cutting edge, to move things around on the board. I cringe every time I see somebody do that.

I am posting from a small smartphone. Can only see so much detail. But there is close to 40-cuts here, call it 40. This is half a cucumber. I might grab 15-cucumbers in the morning. So that would be around 1,200 cuts in total.

Cucumber skin is surprisingly tough. This is sort of like shaving with a DE razor blade. We know that steel is 50-times tougher than facial hair, yet blade edges dull and can become damaged after a few shaves.

In cutting them and additional ones during the day, the knife edge will become dull. I have to continue to find places along the edge to make that first cut to pierce the skin.

Kitchen hint: If your blade is not sharply cutting through fruit or vegetables due to tough skin or a dull knife, turn it over on the cutting board.

If you have to apply too much pressure to get through the skin, chances are that after your knife cuts through, the force will continue and the edge of your knife will end up slamming into the cutting board.

Upside down you can rest the tip on the cutting board press down through the soft part, drawing the blade through the flesh of the cucumber.

You are only catching thin sections of skin as you pass the knife through, as opposed to a large area of skin.

When you reach the bottom, you have only moderate downward force. You are slicing through that last section of skin, where it it held by the cutting board and you slice through it like you would if you were using a single edge utility blade. Your cut will be nice and clean. Without a sharp edge, you can not make cuts like the ones in the photo.

There is a French Chef who makes YouTube videos. They are very good. His cooking school is directly across the street from my old office in Fort Lauderdale.

He is always saying, pick up with the scraper, never the knife. That's fine when you have a whole lot of stuff. I do have a scraper. But when I have a small amount to pick up, I use the spine of the knife to position the stuff into a pile and then use it with my hand to pick it up.

Never the blade, but the spine is ideal for picking up chopped food.

 

[skibik]

When I started DE shaving back in '16 I believe I read a thread about blade flipping and tried it for a number of blades and I didn't see a difference. If the blade starts pulling the whiskers it is going to matter whether the blade is upside or not, it is still dull. If would be different if my face was a sharpening stone then of course like sharpening a knife you need to flip it over and level out the burr from the other side.