Care & Maintenance

With proper care, your KESSAKU Professional Knives and Utensils can be your culinary companions for life. So, follow this guide to ensure continual optimal performance from all your knives and cooking instruments.

(These general rules should pretty much apply to all professional knives and cooking utensils by all manufacturers).

  a. Treat your professional knives and cooking instruments with respect and care. Our blades are extremely sharp, so exercise general caution, and of course, keep them out of the reach of small children. We include custom blade guards with all our knives for added safety as well as beautiful magnetic gift boxes which can be used for their storage.

b. The highly recommended method of cleaning professional knives is – just quickly washing them by hand with a little detergent, followed by drying them with an absorbent towel. (*This is the standard operating procedure used by almost all professional chefs to keep their knives in optimal condition). We highly recommend not washing these in a dishwasher.

c. Our knives use steel chosen for greatly enhanced corrosion and rust resistance. However, as with all professional knives, you never want to leave your knife soaking in soapy water. Over time, moisture and water will cause micro-corrosion in minute levels, which weakens steel. So, after use, clean your blades, dry your blades, and always keep your blades dry and stored properly.

d. In general, when washing cutlery, try to avoid soaps with bleach or heavy citrus extracts as they naturally promote corrosion.

e. Use proper and sane cutting surfaces. Wood, plastic, bamboo, and similar cutting boards are great! Glass, marble, ceramic, and granite surfaces can be damaged by knives (and cause the release of small particles of glass/ceramic/marble which is not really great to get in your food…), and these hard, counter-top type surfaces will also dull your knives.

Other IMPORTANT & HELPFUL TIPS!

• As a practice, it’s always best to periodically hone and sharpen your knives while they’re still relatively sharp. Waiting for your knives to dull will make them take significantly longer to sharpen and hone.
• Quickly honing your blades after use retains a blade’s sharpness significantly longer, which means you’ll need to sharpen less often.
• Use the correct tool for the correct job. Our blades are astonishingly durable. However, for your own safety, the rule for using any knife from any brand is that you never want to force a cut by twisting the blade or prying. For example, you wouldn’t want to use a small paring knife to hack away at something extremely hard like a coconut or something deeply frozen. Instead, you should use a blade-type that’s suitable for such tasks, like a nice, heavy, cleaver.