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Welcome to Robb Recommends, a regular series in which our editors and contributors endorse something they’ve tried and loved—and think will change your life for the better.
There are few things as satisfying in the kitchen as those first few days with a brand-new knife, when the blade slices through foods with ease and precision. Chasing that high is probably why I now own enough knives to fill a couple blocks on my counter. It’s also why I take my blades to a professional sharpener to get them back like new, but this gadget from Horl may replace my trips to the shop.
Before the Horl 2 knife sharpener arrived on my doorstep, I had attempted to sharpen knives myself. During the pandemic, I finally bought a whetstone because the sharpener I went to had closed. I became adept enough at my technique that I could make my knives decently sharp, but never as good as a pro. I’d tried other gadgets, including an electric model that seemed to be doing more harm than good. So I eventually went back to a pro. However, the last couple times, I paid a ton and the results were a bit disappointing. I was looking for something new.
The new thing ended up finding me, hunting me down across the internet. That’s because Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception is, in fact, real. It’s just that instead of thoughts and ideas being implanted in my brain by an extractor played by Leonardo DiCaprio, I’m convinced to do something when an ad constantly shows up in my Instagram stories. That’s what happened with Horl. I was dissatisfied with my knife-sharpening experience (and probably because I’d been Googling around for a new knife-sharpening service), an ad for this little blade-honing gizmo started popping up constantly, especially in my IG stories. Oh to be as happy as the people in the videos with their razor-like knives they sharpened themselves. Considering my bill for my latest trip to the pro, I figured this was worth a try.
Honestly, how the Horl 2 works looked too easy to be true. Instead of holding the knife and sliding it across a stone, this German-designed gadget has you move the stone across the blade. A little magnetic block secures the knife, holding it at the correct angle while you roll a little drum fit with a diamond-coated disc on one side to start the process, and then a porcelain disc on the other to finish the blade. The drum rolls easily back and forth as the block keeps the knife at a consistent angle—one that I was not able to achieve when I was the one controlling the movement blade over the whetstone.
That little difference in the block holding the knife instead of me proved to be huge. From my small petty knife to my nakiri to my eight-inch chef’s blade, the Horl 2 gave each of them a really consistent angle that greatly improved all of their performance. I was cutting up apples for my son’s lunch with the petty with ease, while my nakiri was back to cutting with a precision I’d loved when I first got it. I’m pretty sure I won’t be going back to the sharpening shop anymore.
