Bread knives, or rather serrated knives in general, are quite unusual in every aspect. They have sharp saw-like teeth that no flat-edged blade has, accompanied by a series of gullets in between.
These knives are pretty versatile despite being called bread knives, and their uses cover a whole range of tasks. While the teeth do help these knives’ sharp gullets stay sharper for longer, they will eventually go dull with use. And that unique design makes these knives all the harder to sharpen and maintain.
Hence, the best way to maximize the blade’s lifetime is to know how to keep your bread knife sharp for longer. These include best practices for usage, storage, sharpening, and everything in between. Let’s take a look.
7 Ways to Keep a Bread Knife Sharp
Don’t worry, it’s not too difficult. Just follow these steps to the tee and you’ll find it manageable. I’d advise you to follow them all. However, things might need a bit of “Getting Used To.”
1. Use the Knife How It Was Intended
This is a fundamental requirement that most users don’t abide by. A bread knife is specialized in every aspect of the word, and one must use it in that manner.
Most bread knives don’t use steel of the same hardness level on the Rockwell scale as some high-carbon Japanese steel, which makes things riskier.
For instance, many users try cutting frozen foods or such tough ingredients with their bread knives. That alone can dull the serrated edges of the blade. Along with the sharp teeth, you also risk dulling the beveled side of the knife.
Doing these reduces your knife’s sharpness almost instantly. That also means you shouldn’t use the blade on other materials — like using it as a box cutter.
Too much pressure can misalign the edges, reduce their sharpness, and even cut their longevity short.
Another aspect is cutting in the right manner. While you need to push the blade downward with a standard straight-edged knife, that’s not the case with a bread knife. Instead, you have to cut with it in a back-and-forth sawing motion.
That allows you to cut through ingredients without putting too much stress on the blade. Additionally, the cutting process is far more efficient that way, allowing the blade to remain sharper for longer.
2. Using the Correct Cutting Surfaces
Where you use a serrated knife is just as crucial as how you cut with it. Hence, the cutting surface, which usually is a cutting board, has to be ideal.
A basic rule of thumb is to get a chopping board that is much lower in toughness than your bread knife. If it’s too hard, it can dull the knife every time you cut on it. In a worse case, it can even physically damage the blade.
Glass or marble cutting surfaces are two of the worst culprits in these terms. These are quite hard and can affect the blade negatively. Instead, try using cutting boards made with plastic (food-safe, of course) or grained wood. These are much softer and help prolong the knife’s sharpness.
3. Cleaning after Usage
One of the easiest ways to have your knife rust is not cleaning it after each usage. That allows food particles, and eventually moisture, to cling to the metal.
And regardless of your knife, moisture is bad for it, especially if it’s made of high-carbon steel. These bread knives require strict maintenance, and you should clean them up as soon as you’re done working. Otherwise, the blade corrodes and loses its sharpness.
Don’t think that a stainless steel bread knife is safe from that consequence, either. These knives are more resilient against corrosion but are not invincible either. Hence, don’t leave anything up to chance, and wipe the blade afterward.
4. Washing and Storage
Many manufacturers will claim that you can wash their knives in the dishwasher. While that is technically true, that’s not the ideal cleaning solution for a bread knife.
Firstly, the heat inside the dishwasher can harm the steel’s tempering and may cause it to become increasingly brittle. Additionally, the risks of rust and corrosion are higher as well — all of which hurt the knife’s steel and its sharpness.
Hence, I’d always recommend handwashing your serrated knife, even if it’s made with stainless steel. Use warm water and mild detergent to clean it up, and the blade will thank you.
What comes next is storage, which is just as crucial. Firstly, don’t store the knife along with a thousand other cutleries in a packed drawer. That increases the chances of dents and bumps, which physically hurt the blade and ruin its sharpness.
Try investing in a proper knife storage block, which keeps the knife safe. Make sure that the knife is dry and clean before you store it. Otherwise, storing it in the block wouldn’t help much, and it would still gather rust.
5. Honing the Burred Blade
When you use a knife — regardless of its type — it results in burrs along the edge. These are merely slight misalignments along the knife’s blade and don’t necessarily dull the blade.
However, these misaligned edges keep getting worse as you keep using the knife without maintenance. Consequently, you try to put more pressure on the knife to compensate for that lacking, which continues the circle.
That’s where honing comes in. Take a honing rod with fine grit and run it along the knife’s beveled edge. Usually, the bread knife will only have one side beveled, which makes the job slightly more manageable.
You only need one or two passes for each gullet, and that should get the misaligned edges back in place. Once you’ve done that for the whole knife, you’ll notice a slightly raised edge on the opposite side of the bevel. Give it a slight rundown on a fine whetstone (a rod works, too), and you’re good to go.
Note that the honing rod shouldn’t use anything too coarse, like diamond-coated ones. That will remove a lot of material from the blade, reducing the knife’s longevity. We’ll discuss more on that below.
6. Sharpening in Time
It’s somewhat obvious that you need to sharpen a blade to keep it sharp, no?
But there’s more to it. You should sharpen a knife at the right time — not too early, not too late. Sure, sharpening the knife frequently would technically keep it sharper, but you’ll gradually ruin its capabilities.
Firstly, the gullets in the blade are of a specific shape. When you sharpen the knife, you take material off its edge, meaning that the space between each tooth becomes smaller. As you know, the depth of the gullets is highly crucial in helping a bread knife cut more efficiently.
Secondly, sharpening the fine teeth too frequently can also reduce their strength and make them brittle. That directly harms their capability of holding sharpness for longer.
On the other hand, waiting too long to sharpen the bread knife can be detrimental. You have to put more pressure to make the dull edges cut through and make the teeth even duller. As a result, the gaps between the teeth become smaller with time.
Moreover, you’d require more aggressive sharpening if you’re late to the process. That takes more material off the blade than would’ve been necessary.
That’s why it’s paramount that you sharpen a bread knife during the right time frame to retain its sharpness.
7. Using the Right Sharpening Tools
There are many ways of sharpening a bread knife — electric knife sharpeners, whetstones, and sharpening stones. However, use only a sharpening stone if you want to keep the knife sharp for longer. I’ll explain why.
Whetstones and Electric Knife Sharpeners
Some premium electric sharpeners can work with bread knives. However, you have little to no control over them. The slots come with a fixed degree of coarseness, and you cannot be selective about the process.
All you can do is put the whole blade through the sharpener with each pass and hope that it comes out all right. In most cases, it’ll fail to sharpen each tooth and gullet evenly, which dulls some of them quicker than the rest.
And since you can’t selectively sharpen some of the gullets, you’re out of luck there too.
On the other hand, whetstones are only ideal for straight-edged knives. Since you have to sharpen the blade by forcing it against the surface in a flat manner, there’s no way to reach the gaps between the serrations.
In both cases, you’ll try to do it more aggressively and end up making the gullets smaller. Consequently, the knife won’t last long as it would with a proper sharpening session.
Sharpening Rods
Enter sharpening rods. These are like honing rods, except much coarser. They’ll often use materials like diamond, which can remove a significant amount of metal at once.
Most honing rods’ girth gradually gets thinner as you go up. This allows you to find the correct diameter for your knife’s gullets. Unless the gullets are unusually small, most sharpening rods should work fine.
Being able to reach the gaps between the serrated edges allows you to sharpen the knife more efficiently and remove only as much material as you need. Thirdly, it allows you to sharpen each gullet selectively to reach a uniform result.
All these help the knife performs more consistently and allow you to work without stressing them too hard — preserving its sharpness. Moreover, these do not flatten the teeth, meaning the gullets retain their depth. This depth allows for efficient cutting and helps it stay in shape as well.
You can even find sharpening rods with varying grits to use what your blade requires.
This process may seem tedious, but you only sharpen your bread knife once or twice a year, and the results are worthwhile. Therefore, using the right sharpening tool is essential to keeping your bread knife sharp for extended periods.
Is It Worth Sharpening a Bread Knife?
We’ve discussed how sharpening a bread knife occasionally can help retain its sharpness for longer. But the age-old question arises, should you even bother sharpening a bread knife?
The short answer is that it can certainly be.
Note that sharpening a bread knife isn’t worthwhile if you’ve only got a cheap product made with inexpensive materials. These are much tougher to sharpen, and you’d be better off replacing them once their sharpness wears off. Many of these knives come with tiny gullets, which make things worse.
However, sharpening is worthwhile if the knife is of decent quality and you want it to retain its sharpness. Provided that bread knives rarely require sharpening and touching them up once can last a long time — it only makes sense to do so!
It may seem like a lot of effort, but sharpening a quality knife and using it for an extended period is far better than a cheap, replaceable option. The experience speaks for itself, and putting in the effort to keep it sharp makes the investment worthwhile.
Conclusion
Bread knives tend to be this mystery to many knife users, what with their serrated teeth and varying gullets. However, that very nature allows them to work efficiently, and putting in a bit of effort can make them last a long time! All you need to know is how to keep your bread knife sharp, which should now be taken care of.