My wife wanted a decent cooking knife for her birthday. Now what do I need to do to keep that knife in good shape?

From u/southsamurai -

Olay, as usual there's old, outdated info floating around.

Honing steels, butcher's steels, or knife steels, no matter what you call them, are used to "refresh" an edge.

For a long time, people thought that it was straightening the edge out, or something similar. But, we have these wonderful devices called microscopes, and people finally got around to using them to improve sharpening.

What all hones do is remove small amounts of steel from the very finest part of the edge, sometimes called the apex. The only real difference is how efficiently they do so, and if they do any harm along the way.

In the case of metal honing steels, they tend to be safe for most knives. But when used on high hardness knives, like the kind found on high dollar japanese knives, they can cause chipping.

But they'll work. They do the job slower, and with less change in sharpness,, than ceramic or diamond honing rods. In most cases, the cheapest ceramic rod is going to do a better job than the fanciest steel honing rod.

But all of them are used by drawing the knife, from heel to tip, down the length of the blade, at a slightly higher angle than the knife originally has. Three or four passes is all you'll usually need, even with the kind you have. They are typically used as needed, meaning that when you notice your knife isn't cutting the mustard, so to speak.

Now, how often to sharpen depends on the knives, how often you use them, and how you use them. A meh quality knife may need actual sharpening, as in being ground on stones in a controlled manner, as often as weekly under frequent use in a home kitchen. Really good knives, with a low frequency of use can go years.

Sharpening, be it freehand on whetstones, or using a guided rod system (like the famous Lansky kit, though there are other and better options now), or even doing something horrible like using a grinder or pull through unsharpener; that's more conjugated complicated than a single comment can cover from top to bottom. Luckily, the single best online beginner's resource is right here on reddit: r/sharpening. Their wiki has a superb beginner section. No matter how much effort you want to put in, you can learn to sharpen a knife to acceptable levels in very minimal time. You do have to pay more for less effort, but even then you havr options for any budget range.

If you are interested, there's other sites that cover what happens on a microscopic level to steel when sharpened with various materials and techniques. But this comment is already more than most people care to read at once, so I won't bother unless you do care.

Edit: for them that doubt the info about honing steels, there is good data with visuals out there.

Original comment with working links (URL seems odd, hope it works)- https://old.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/upuyor/deleted_by_user/i8ncn3f/

Oh, another thing. I have damaged knives by using them to crush garlic. There's no need to actually use the side of your blade if you're worried about that sort of thing. I bent one blade and managed to shatter the (cheap plastic) handle of a knife that I got second hand. I still do it occasionally, of course, but I make sure I'm not going to bend or jarr it when I do.