Cutting board
Encyclopedia
A cutting board is a durable board on which to place material for cutting. Common is the kitchen cutting board used in preparing food; other types exist for cutting raw materials such as leather or plastic.
Kitchen cutting boards are often made of wood
or plastic
. There are also cutting boards made of glass
, steel
or marble
, which are easier to clean than wooden or plastic ones such as nylon or corian, but tend to damage knives due to their hardness. Rough cutting edges — such as serrated knives — abrade and damage a cutting surface more rapidly than do smooth cutting implements.
Wood has some advantages over plastic in that it is somewhat self-healing; shallow cuts in the wood will close up on their own. Wood also has natural anti-septic properties.
Hardwoods with tightly grained wood and small pores are best for wooden cutting boards. Good hardness and tight grain help reduce scoring of the cutting surface and absorption of liquid and dirt into the surface. Red oak
for example, even though a hardwood, has large pores, so it retains dirt even after washing, making it a poor choice for cutting-board material.
Teak
's tight grains and natural coloration make it a highly attractive cutting-board material, both for aesthetic and durability purposes. Teak, a tropical wood, contains tectoquinones, components of natural oily resins that repel moisture, fungi, warping, rot and microbes.
Wood boards need to be cared for with mineral oil to avoid warping, and should not be left in puddles of liquid.
Care must be taken when selecting wood, especially tropical hardwood, for use as a cutting board, as some species contain toxins or allergens.
Although technically a grass, laminated strips of bamboo
also make an attractive and durable cutting-board material.
Plastic boards are usually called PE Cutting boards, PE being a shorthand for polyethylene
, the material of which these boards are made.
Semi-disposable thin flexible cutting boards also ease transferring their contents to a cooking or storage vessel.
shares with glass the advantages of the durability and ease of cleaning, as well as the tendency to damage knives. Depending on the exact steel and heat treatment used, at best a steel cutting board will wear the edge on knives quickly; at worst chip, dent, or roll it like glass.
Kitchen cutting boards are often made of wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
or plastic
Plastic
A plastic material is any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids used in the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular mass, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce production costs...
. There are also cutting boards made of glass
Glass
Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...
, steel
Steel
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...
or marble
Marble
Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite.Geologists use the term "marble" to refer to metamorphosed limestone; however stonemasons use the term more broadly to encompass unmetamorphosed limestone.Marble is commonly used for...
, which are easier to clean than wooden or plastic ones such as nylon or corian, but tend to damage knives due to their hardness. Rough cutting edges — such as serrated knives — abrade and damage a cutting surface more rapidly than do smooth cutting implements.
Sanitation and care
Regardless of the material, regular maintenance of a cutting board is important.- Sanitation with cutting boards is a delicate process because bacteria can reside in grooves produced by cutting, or in liquids left on the board. For this reason, it is often advised to cut raw meatMeatMeat is animal flesh that is used as food. Most often, this means the skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as organs and offal...
on separate cutting boards from cooked meat, vegetableVegetableThe noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....
s or other foods. - A very dilute bleachBleachBleach refers to a number of chemicals that remove color, whiten, or disinfect, often via oxidation. Common chemical bleaches include household chlorine bleach , lye, oxygen bleach , and bleaching powder...
solution is best for disinfecting cutting boards. - To remove odors, rinse the board and then rub with coarse salt and let stand for several minutes. Wipe the board and then rinse it clean. This procedure will also smooth out minor imperfections in the wood.
- Wooden boards should never be placed in the dishwasher, or left immersed for long periods, as the wood or glue may be affected.
- A light food-grade mineral oilMineral oilA mineral oil is any of various colorless, odorless, light mixtures of alkanes in the C15 to C40 range from a non-vegetable source, particularly a distillate of petroleum....
is a good preservative for wooden cutting boards, as it helps keep water from seeping into the grain. Alternatively, one may also use a food-grade drying oilDrying oilA drying oil is an oil that hardens to a tough, solid film after a period of exposure to air. The oil hardens through a chemical reaction in which the components crosslink by the action of oxygen . Drying oils are a key component of oil paint and some varnishes...
such as poppyseed oilPoppyseed oilPoppyseed oil is an edible oil from poppy seeds . The oil has culinary and pharmaceutical uses, as well as long established uses in the making of paints, varnishes, and soaps.Poppy seeds yield 45–50% oil...
, tung oilTung oilTung oil or China wood oil is a drying oil obtained by pressing the seed from the nut of the tung tree . As a drying oil, tung oil hardens upon exposure to air. The resulting coating is transparent plastic-like and is exploited in most of its applications, which include wood finishing and the...
or linseed oilLinseed oilLinseed oil, also known as flaxseed oil, is a clear to yellowish oil obtained from the dried ripe seeds of the flax plant . The oil is obtained by cold pressing, sometimes followed by solvent extraction...
. The first two dry much faster than linseed. Note that most commercially available linseed and tung oils are not “food grade”, as they contain metallic driers. In general, edible savory vegetable or olive oils are not recommended because they tend to go rancid, causing the board to smell and your food to pick up the rancid taste. - To prevent cracking, cutting boards should be treated when they start looking dry. A standard recommendation is 5-7 times a year, or as needed.
- When heavily or deeply scored, wood or plastic cutting boards should be resurfaced, as scoring can harbor bacteria, or mildewMildewMildew refers to certain kinds of molds or fungi.In Old English, it meant honeydew , and later came to mean mildew in the modern sense of mold or fungus....
in the case of plastic boards. Wood can be easily resurfaced with various woodworking tools, such as scrapersCard scraperA card scraper is a woodworking shaping and finishing tool. It is used to manually remove small amounts of material and excels in tricky grain areas where hand planes would cause tear out. Card scrapers are most suitable for working with hardwoods, and can be used instead of sandpaper...
or planesPlane (tool)A hand plane is a tool for shaping wood. When powered by electricity, the tool may be called a planer. Planes are used to flatten, reduce the thickness of, and impart a smooth surface to a rough piece of lumber or timber. Planing is used to produce horizontal, vertical, or inclined flat surfaces on...
. SandpaperSandpaperSandpaper, also known as glasspaper, is a heavy paper with abrasive material attached to its surface.Sandpaper is part of the "coated abrasives" family of abrasive products. It is used to remove small amounts of material from surfaces, either to make them smoother , to remove a layer of material...
is to be avoided, as it leaves in the surface residual abrasives which will dull knives. Resurfacing a plastic cutting board is more difficult and replacing it is recommended instead.
Materials
A knife edge is a delicate structure and can easily be blunted by too abrasive a surface. Alternatively, it can be chipped if used on a surface that is too hard. A good cutting board material must be soft, easy to clean, and non-abrasive, but not fragile to the point of being destroyed. Hard cutting boards can, however, be used for food preparation tasks that do not require a sharp knife, like cutting cheese or making sandwiches.Wood
Hardwoods with tightly grained wood and small pores are best for wooden cutting boards. Good hardness and tight grain help reduce scoring of the cutting surface and absorption of liquid and dirt into the surface. Red oak
Oak
An oak is a tree or shrub in the genus Quercus , of which about 600 species exist. "Oak" may also appear in the names of species in related genera, notably Lithocarpus...
for example, even though a hardwood, has large pores, so it retains dirt even after washing, making it a poor choice for cutting-board material.
Teak
Teak
Teak is the common name for the tropical hardwood tree species Tectona grandis and its wood products. Tectona grandis is native to south and southeast Asia, mainly India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Burma, but is naturalized and cultivated in many countries, including those in Africa and the...
's tight grains and natural coloration make it a highly attractive cutting-board material, both for aesthetic and durability purposes. Teak, a tropical wood, contains tectoquinones, components of natural oily resins that repel moisture, fungi, warping, rot and microbes.
Wood boards need to be cared for with mineral oil to avoid warping, and should not be left in puddles of liquid.
Care must be taken when selecting wood, especially tropical hardwood, for use as a cutting board, as some species contain toxins or allergens.
Although technically a grass, laminated strips of bamboo
Bamboo
Bamboo is a group of perennial evergreens in the true grass family Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae, tribe Bambuseae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family....
also make an attractive and durable cutting-board material.
Plastic
While plastic is theoretically a more sanitary material than wood for cutting boards, testing has shown this may not be the case. The softer surface of plastic boards is scored by knives, and the resulting grooves and cuts in the surface harbour bacteria even after being well washed. A plastic surface can also ruin the sharp edge of the knife. However, unlike wood, plastic boards do allow rinsing with harsher cleaning chemicals such as bleach and other disinfectants without damage to the board or retention of the chemicals to later contaminate food.Plastic boards are usually called PE Cutting boards, PE being a shorthand for polyethylene
Polyethylene
Polyethylene or polythene is the most widely used plastic, with an annual production of approximately 80 million metric tons...
, the material of which these boards are made.
Semi-disposable thin flexible cutting boards also ease transferring their contents to a cooking or storage vessel.
Rubber
A recent trend has seen thick solid rubber pads used as cutting boards in the Sani-Tuff line popular in restaurant kitchens. They are about as expensive as well-made wood boards, they can take chemical disinfectants, and they are very heavy for their size, so they tend not to slip. Proponents claim remarkable self-healing properties, the same knife protection as good plastic or wood boards, and an inability to harbor significant amounts of moisture or bacteria.Glass
While glass looks like an easy surface to keep clean, glass cutting boards can damage knives because of the high hardness of the material. Cutting on glass tends to dent, roll or even chip knife edges in a rapid manner. Additionally, if used for chopping instead of slicing, glass can shatter or chip itself, contaminating food.Steel
SteelSteel
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...
shares with glass the advantages of the durability and ease of cleaning, as well as the tendency to damage knives. Depending on the exact steel and heat treatment used, at best a steel cutting board will wear the edge on knives quickly; at worst chip, dent, or roll it like glass.
External links
- Cutting Board Basics page from About.com
- Cooking For Engineers' Cutting Boards Article
- Cutting Boards - Useful tips for choosing kitchen cutting boards.
- Chopping board - risks of cross contamination
- MAKO Cutting Boards - Cutting Board Types and Care