Quote:
Originally Posted by Fried Meat Ball!
Both are important factors. The difference between a double bevel blade sharpened at 22 degrees vs. a double bevel blade at 15 degrees is not 7 degrees. It's 7 degrees on both sides, 14 degrees. And the perceived sharpness from a thinner blade is apparent.
I have 8 Japanese blades and only two are single bevel. There are a ton of styles of Japanese blades that are double bevel.
And it's not just personal preference. One of the generally accepted defining characteristics of Japanese blades is a smaller angle than Western blades.
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Both are important factors, but only one will cause any damage using the sharpeners offered here. Nobody other than a professional sushi chef is going to be able to notice the difference between 15 degrees and 22 degrees. And it's pretty unlikely that anyone here could achieve an edge of uniform angle anyway, even with fixed angle sharpeners, simply because of the curvature of knives. Of course it matters, but no one here is a professional chef. And the entire reason for saying be careful buying some sharpeners for Japanese blades is because of the single bevel, and not the angle of sharpening. You can sharpen a single bevel Japanese knife at 30 degrees and it's not going to damage the knife. It just cuts different. But if you try and sharpen a single bevel knife on both sides like a double bevel, that's when you'll ruin the blade. In some scenarios, you would actually want a more angled edge. But for things like sushi, you want it as thin as possible while still maintaining enough durability to last a while. They sometimes even take it a step further and concave the blade above the bevel in order to make the blade thinner without simply reducing the bevel angle. Thinness of the blade and the bevel angle are two separate components.