I hadn’t thought about whether the glue used in bamboo and wooden boards was food-safe. It seems many manufacturers don’t disclose info about the glue or the treatment. Also, I’m not very tall so I need a board that’s not very thick. I may have to go the custom route. And I thought finding a non-toxic cutting board would be relatively easy.
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If you have a Marshall’s/TJMaxx/HomeGoods store near you, they typically have a decent selection of thinner all-wood cutting boards. Many of them in the smaller sizes are made from a single piece of wood, without any glues. You should start seeing many of them getting marked down/clearanced as we approach the end of the holiday season.
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I respectfully disagree about hard rock maple being the best. It’s certainly the easiest wood to come by in the U.S. for end-grain boards, and of the three most common choices – maple, walnut, and cherry – the most durable. But there are better options available, especially in Europe, particularly beech and hornbeam.
Cherry is also significantly softer than walnut and so less durable. I happen to prefer the color of cherry, but walnut is quite a dark, rich color and this has the advantages of hiding stains really well.
This article is pretty spot-on: https://www.brooklynbutcherblocks.com/blogs/news/best-wood-for-a-cutting-board
advice / revelations / etc from people “selling their product” is very suspect.
search bamboo cutting boards - they rave about it . . . which is normal - that’s what they sell. they’re not likely to point out any negative issues.
as for cherry, here’s your source:
" . . . I definitely notice it wears faster. Your home chef probably won’t notice it, but Mighty Quinn’s BBQ certainly has seen how quickly it wears when you’re chopping meat on it for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year."
I will respectfully decline to accept the assumptions of “extreme usage” as pertinent to the “home kitchen”
as for European beech and hornbeam - if you live there, go for it.
if you don’t live in Europe, it may be less happy-making…
BBB doesn’t sell beech or bamboo cutting boards, so I think it’s safe to assume he’s not touting the former’s virtues to make a buck. He simply describes it as his favorite.
Years ago I made edge-grain boards using a combination of cherry, walnut and maple. Within a few years the cherry and walnut showed heavy wear, while the maple was largely unscathed. End-grain boards are more resilient, but sharp knives will still cut into those made of softer woods far more easily than those made of hornbeam, beech or maple. Of course YMMV, but I would hardly describe my cooking habits as extreme use.
Most wood cutting boards are very good. I think the preference of harder wood such as maple (~1400 Janka) vs soft wood such as hinoki (~700 Janka) is entirely personal preference. I kind of agree with you that softer wood is a little easier for the harder knives. So I think it is a tradeoff – between the knives or the cutting boards.
Talk about abusing/heavily use cutting boards. I think these Cantonese BBQ chopping blocks get a lot of useage.
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I have a larch board, along with maple. Yes, larch is softer, but so far I am quite pleased. It has been a little under a year.
Yes.
We need to be clear about what we want and expect cutting boards to do.
Ignoring temporarily that most people want them to look good, they primarily function to (a) protect the underlying surface from the knife; and (b) provide support and resistance for the thing being cut, i.e., something to cut against.
Kindness to knives and wear are second-order concerns. You can always resharpen, and even very worn and dished butcher blocks function quite well without accordion cuts.
The interesting question for me is: Do we want ( or mind) our knives cutting the board along with the food? Some of that is inescapable. But end-grain (and self-healing synthetic) boards minimize it, even if they raise a prospect of chipping an embedded, twisted edge. Cutting on an end-grain wood board can be likened to throwing darts into a bristle datboard–the steel separates but doesn’t cleave the board.
My opinion is that the most efficient cutting motion is rarely to plunge the edge into the food as a vector perpendiculat to the board-- at the bottom of such a stroke, you’re just pinching the food into pieces against the board. I prefer pushing or pulling cuts across foods, and believe this is kinder to the knife (except on glass and stone “boards”)
I consider hygiene a tertiary concern. I suppose that’s easy to say if you’re not exploding at both ends from festering embedded foods. So my ideal board might well be a softer wood, cut end-grain, like your hinoki slice. Supports the food enough, protects the counter, gentler on the edge and promotional of push/pull without hacking up the wood.
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Hinoki boards are almost exclusively sold as edge-grain, with the exception of a few sellers on Etsy (for a huge premium). Traditionally Japanese makers produce only edge-grain boards with it, however. It’s intended to be soft and yielding, but sharp knives will still cut into it since its Janka hardness is only about 500-800. It’s also quite porous…
Sunshine’s Rule of Existence:
For literally every item that exists on the planet, there is at least one article that natters on about how great it is and how it can cure life, and at least another article that blathers on about how it was born of pure evil and will poison us immediately.
I just stop reading. Life is fatal.
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the butcher shop dates back to 1874, the block to about 1900-ish,
still in the family.
maple, end grain, used everyday, all day
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Ooops. Birch.
I was referring to Chem’s round end-grain board, which exists, and would be easy to cut from a log.
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I see boards labeled beech wood a fair bit in my neck of the US, but don’t think I’ve ever seen hornbeam (and/or probably wouldn’t recognize it if I did).
American beech and European beech are not the same ‘tree’ . . . one of the lovelies of “common names”
American beech shrinks/swells more than alternatives - unless kept oiled it can split or de-laminate. it is close grained and cut resistant - plussi and minusi . . .
Ah, I see; thanks. So, now I’m wondering, did settlers from England (etc.) come to US and think, “well, that looks like a beech so let’s call it a beech”? (Edit, see [1])
There’s a narrow horizontal slice of the Midwestern US spanning 4-5 states where green bell peppers were called “mangoes”.
[1] My “TIL” google - apparently there’s up to a baker’s dozen beech-related tree types (not sure why they give the “10-13” range; maybe there’s some argument amongst the eggheads).
- “Both of these lovely hardwood, deciduous trees belong to the Fagus subgenera of beech trees. European beech is classified as Fagus sylvatica and American beech is classified as Fagus grandifolia. 10 to 13 beech tree species are split between two distinct subgenera, Fagus and Engleriana”.
in a quiet year, if you can’t find any bigger rabbit hole to go down,
“taxonomy” will keep you busy for a lifetime . . .
and just when you’ve got it down, the eggheads change their minds . . .
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Pluto IS a planet, Dangit!
Or maybe a dog…
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Plastic, or tiny bits of cured wood glue. Take your pick, because if you’re not using a plain wide plank of unglued wood, you’re going to get one or the other.
And end-grain boards, otherwise considered to be “premium,” expose more glue lines to your work surface.
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