White Steel #2 - High Carbon Steel

White Steel is crafted with a focus on minimizing impurities and amongst its many variations, White Steel #2 is regarded as having the best balance. It is a knife steel we recommend in the store often for a large variety of reasons. While there isn't a knife steel that suits every use case, we feel White Steel #2 meets most of them and recommend ours proudly. This steel focuses on the perfect balance of sharpness and maintainability, all while still without burning through your wallet on simpler models. It's also an excellent steel for people who love to sharpen as it is wonderful to work with and maintain.

When buying your first Japanese knife, we highly recommend starting off with White Steel #2 as the best choice.

Just as a chef’s skill can be truly tested by a spaghetti aglio e olio, a knife artisan’s skill can be similarly tested by how they create White Steel #2 knives.

White Steel #2, also called Shirogami #2 sets the standard for Japanese knives. It’s the most widely used, and knife artisan’s reputations can be based primarily on how high quality their White Steel #2 knives are.

From forging to heat treatment and edge sharpening, the mastery of all these processes using White Steel #2 is considered a major milestone in a knife artisan’s career.

Further, when discussing attributes of other steels like hard versus soft, easy to sharpen versus difficult to sharpen, or rust-prone versus rust-resistant, White Steel #2 is generally used as the benchmark to compare these to. Effectively, White Steel #2 can be considered the standard and main comparison point that all other Japanese knives are based on.

Of course, White Steel #2 has also been given a very strong reputation due to the feedback from general users of the end product, further establishing its name and fame.

Steel material is crucial for indicating a knife's initial performance (amongst many other things related to craftsman ability and more). Below are some comparisons to give you some understanding showing what a particular step of the process does in terms of impacting sharpness, balance and maintainability.

There’s three key pointers in the above chart to focus on.

• Steel Material has a large impact on sharpness and maintainability (ease of sharpening and resistance to rust).

• Apart from sharpness, heat treatment and the sharpening process in knife creation also have a large impact on sharpness.

• Measuring a knife’s strengths is more than just its sharpness. Balance and maintainability also need to be considered.

Based on the above steel mapping chart, White Steel #2 falls in this position on the graph below

White Steel #2 - Pure and Straightforward

Let’s look at the tables below and explore the composition of White Steel #2 more deeply.

White Steel #2 is only composed of five elements: Carbon (C), Silicon (Si), Phosphorus (P), Sulfur (S) and Manganese (Mn). Phosphorus and sulfur levels are kept low also as they are known to create brittleness, making White Steel #2 a genuinely pure steel.