One dull knife

[theonew]

My wife and I both enjoy having our kitchen knives extremely sharp and I'm happy to keep them that way. For awhile I was even polishing the edges but now I just stop at a 1200 grit EF DMT. While they may not be smooth face-shaving push-cutters, if they are on the knife rack, they are extremely sharp. I've been very obsessive about this and if a knife is even slightly dull I'll immediately sharpen it with the DMT hone which sits near our kitchen sink.
   
The other day she was peeling potatoes with a Vic pairing knife and said she cut herself and that sometimes our knives are just too sharp. I suggested she use a potato peeler instead but she just scoffed. Too sharp, what does that mean

But in the interest of compromise I rummaged through a drawer of random things and found an old pairing knife that we haven't used in many years. I felt the edge and it was still modestly sharp, but it definitely was in need of a touch-up. So I made the deal with her that I will not sharpen that particular knife until she asks me too and when I do I will stop before it gets that crazy sharpness to it. At first I thought this was going to be really hard for me. Every time I see that dull knife on the rack I'm just going to want to sharpen it. My strategy was to just ignore it, pretend it's not there. But then, by about the third day, I had a burrito on a plate I was going to take back to my desk. On the way out the door, I decide I should cut it in half. Normally I would take the burrito off the plate and cut it on a cutting board, but this time I look over at the evil dull knife I'd been ignoring, take it off the rack and cut on the ceramic plate. It felt good, like I had purged an obsession from my consciousness. Since then I have started to use it for other tasks like cutting cheese that don't require much if any sharpness at all. I can't believe I'm saying this but having a dullish knife around does seem to have some value

[jzmtl]

Heh yeah a dull paring knife in the kitchen is pretty useful, there are times a sharp knife would be dangerous like taking out the eyes on potato.
 
I think 600~800 grit is the best grit finish for kitchen knives, a polished edge won't bite into meat, especially hard fat and other connective tissue, whereas a medium grit finished will go through like a chainsaw.

Unless you have more than 1 chef's knife that is. 

[theonew]

I have one custom chef's knife in D2 that I do sharpen pretty much exclusively to somewhere around 16000 grit. But that isn't an everyday, all-purpose kind of kitchen knife. IIRC the maker said it was around 61-62 HRC and I keep it sharpened at about 10 degrees per side, so it wouldn't take much misuse to chip that edge. In fact it did chip slightly when I used it at friend's place and it cut so deeply into their soft wood cutting board that it got wedged and the lateral pressure I was exerting was enough to cause a few small chips.

Even with a polished, hair-whittling edge that carbidey D2 still shows some teeth and slicing aggression though. It's a freaky sharp knife. My neighbor returned a knife I lent her and as she was replacing it on our magnetic knife holder, next to this blade, she got a small cut on the back of her finger. It was more like a scratch, stopped bleeding in a minute and wasn't particularly painful, but she was freaked out and swore that her hand was never even close to this other knife