The Simple Way To Sharpen Kitchen Knives With Nothing But A Coffee Mug In A Pinch

Imagine this scenario: You're chopping away, ready to serve up another fantastic meal for your family, and then you find that your knife is barely sharp enough to slice through a cucumber on your cutting board. But unless you're an avid home chef (or a professional), you probably don't have a fancy sharpening tool lying around in the kitchen. While you could use something like aluminum foil to sharpen your dull knife quickly, a slightly less well-known trick is to reach for a regular coffee mug.

Simply find any ceramic coffee mug, turn it over, find the unglazed, slightly rough ring around the bottom, and place it firmly on your counter or table. Then, take your knife and run it lightly along the edge of that unglazed ring at about a 20-degree angle a few times on each side. Then, you can carefully test the sharpness with your fingertip and continue cooking if you're happy with the result. Resume chopping and slicing to your heart's content. This method is good if you're just looking for a quick fix, but keep in mind that it's really only recommended anecdotally for sharpening knives, and may not be a good solution in the long term.

Honing and sharpening are terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are slightly different in actuality. Honing, which should be done more often, helps your knives maintain their sharpness for as long as possible by smoothing out bumps on the edge of the blade. Sharpening, however, involves grinding the material down (using something like a whetstone) to a sharper point, which many knife manufacturers suggest doing once or twice a year as needed. '

However, your sharpening needs can vary greatly depending on the knife you're using. As a sharpener, ceramic is harder than steel, so this trick would be able to sharpen and even leave behind some fine metal shavings. There are ceramic honing rods and both coarse or fine sharpening stones out on the market, so it makes sense that this coffee mug hack could work in a pinch since it's made of the same material. 

But just because something works when there is nothing else available doesn't mean it should be a permanent solution. Make sure you're using a mug that is not treated with anything around that bottom edge because it might not actually be an unglazed ceramic surface –– which makes this trick fairly useless. Also, if you're not experienced with sharpening your knives yourself, this trick could damage your knife even more or possibly cause physical harm if you accidentally aim it the wrong way. This is why it's better and safer to opt for tools that are meant to do the job (or ask a professional to do it for you).