A while back, quite a while back to be honest, we wrote a short article about cutting boards – because one of our readers asked us to!
And given the fact that we care about knives and want everyone else to as well, it only made sense to cover various cutting board options primarily from the perspective of knife care (ie not damaging them) but also from hygiene and aesthetic points of view. You can read the original article here
Not a lot changes in cutting board technology generally speaking and we stand by all our advice in the original article, but what prompted us to do an update was all of these ads (mainly on YouTube) about these wonderful new titanium cutting boards. So we thought we’d better find out more about them.
As mentioned above, our primary focus is always ‘will this cutting board damage knives?’. A very simple rule of thumb is that the harder the material the cutting board is made out of, the more likely it is to damage your knife, either by ‘rolling’ the sharp edge making it effectively blunt, or worse, chipping the blade.
Top of the list for worst material for a cutting board is glass, closely followed by granite and any metal. These very hard surfaces are generally bad for your knives – unless you’re happy to be sharpening them all the time. More forgiving materials are traditional wooden cutting boards, as well as plastic ones, and there are even some rubber cutting boards out there.
The main benefits of the titanium boards is they are hypoallergenic (and so minimise bacterial issues) and, being a slightly softer metal, they are less tough on your knives than stainless steel cutting boards. Plus you can put them in your dishwasher with no ill effects.
The argument that plastic cutting boards are more hygienic that wooden ones was debunked back in 1994, with research indicating that wood is naturally bacteria resistant (as explained in our previous article).
So as long as you look after your wooden cutting boards – washing them after use and letting them dry naturally (you could put them in the dishwasher but this will shorten their lifespan) there shouldn’t be any issue of harmful bacteria hiding in your cutting board, and they shouldn’t go mouldy either.
The other issue with plastic chopping boards is of course microplastics – not something anybody really cared about when we wrote the first article – and so there’s another reason not to use them.
There are also other less immediately apparent downsides with glass / granite / metal cutting boards…
Firstly chopping anything on a hard cutting board is going to be a noisier experience and secondly, since the surface is smoother, there’s a greater likelihood of your knife slipping when you’re chopping or cutting. Wood tends to absorb the noise a bit better and you’re less likely to have a blade slip on wood as well.
If we’ve persuaded you to stay with the wooden cutting boards there is still a ‘pecking order’.
The best wooden boards are ‘end grain’ boards – the ones that look a little like small chessboards, because they have the softer part of the wood forming the surface of the board in little square blocks. The next best ones are the ‘flat grain’ boards, which are most of the wooden boards out there. Finally, bamboo cutting boards are very inexpensive and popular and they are generally fine but they are slightly harder on your knives than traditional wooden boards.
And just a final word on using cutting/chopping boards: it’s one thing having things sliding around on the cutting board (particularly larger items), it’s quite another to have the cutting board itself sliding around on your bench top.
Some cutting boards come with little rubber feet for this very reason, but most don’t. The quick and easy solution is to put a damp tea towel underneath your board and hey presto it won’t slide. Or if you’re really organised you could get some of that non slip matting and cut it into the shape of your cutting boards and use those instead.
Let us know if you have any other cutting board tips or feedback. And do you have a titanium cutting board? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
