Top chefs know better than anyone the importance of a well-sharpened knife, their finely honed favorites able to slide effortlessly through a tomato with little more than the blade’s weight against the flesh of the fruit.
If you offered any pro chef a knife from a dollar store, they’d probably laugh you out of the kitchen, but as Japanese YouTuber Jun Yoshizuki recently demonstrated in a video on his JunsKitchen channel, even the cheap ones can be turned into something sliceworthy if you know what to do.
Using a knife purchased from one of Japan’s ubiquitous 100-yen “dollar” stores, Jun sets about reshaping the blade with some careful strokes on a sharpening stone.
Job done, Jun demonstrates just how easily his newly sharpened knife can slip through paper, a tomato, and, rather spectacularly, three water bottles lined up side by side.
Jun says he gets a lot of people asking him about the best knives to use for food prep. But of course, there’s no straight answer to such a question.
“It’s going to depend on your budget, what shapes you want your knives to be, which steel you want your knives to be made of, brand, design – there’s just so many things that you need to think about before getting one,” Jun explains to his YouTube audience.
“But one thing I can say for sure is that no matter how much you’re going to spend on your knives, they eventually get dull, and you need to sharpen them.”
Jun says that just as he demonstrated with his $1 knife, the best way to help it hit its potential is by using a sharpening stone. For more tips on how to get a crazy-sharp knife, head over to DT’s handy tutorial video here.
And be sure to check out Jun’s “Sharpening a $1 knife” video above, too. His cat wasn’t impressed, but you will be.
