Post #2007: How hard is it to switch to wood cutting boards?

Short answer, easy. The only thing wood won’t do, that plastic will, is flex. Everything else is not a problem.

But when They say “hand wash only”, They really mean it. See Death by Dishwasher below. Also search “sanitary” (below), if that’s your hangup with wood.

Introduction

As a matter of precaution, I’ve decided to stop cutting my food up on heavily-scarred sheets of soft plastic, a.k.a., elderly plastic cutting boards.

I came to that decision via the well-known Universal Law of Credit Card Accounting, also known as the CCW rule, which states that:

All studies intended to alarm the public regarding microplastic in the diet must translate their accounting for plastic consumed to CCWs (credit-card's-worth or credit-cards'-weight.)

This rule is a real time-saver, allowing me to ignore any further click-bait regarding microplastic consumption, if it is expressed in CCWs. This is laid out in Post #2004, with brief citations as to sources.

And, thanks to the CCW rule, I was able to compare two implausible studies of plastic in the diet to arrive at a seemingly plausible conclusion: Using plastic cutting boards materially increases the amount of microplastic you ingest.

Duh? I mean, it’s a pretty good guess that if the cutting surface is heavily scratched, you ate some of that surface.

Whatever that amount may be. Likely, it’s a few microCCWs per week, that is, millionths of a credit-card’s-worth. Again, see Post #2004.

I’d say the jury is still out on whether or not that’s a significant health hazard. At the minimum, it’s worth recalling friable asbestos insulation. That fiberous rock was thought to cause lung cancer via presence of persistent micro-fibers in the body. So it’s not beyond the pale to think that persistent micro-fragments of foreign matter, in the human body, particularly within cells, are probably best avoided, particularly if you can easily avoid them.

That hardly seems lefty-looney to me. More like prudent. This, coming from the wall-to-wall carpet microplastic-fiber Hades in which I currently reside. But that’s a different story.

Separately, just because a substance is widely used (e.g., asbestos, Freon, leaded gasoline) doesn’t mean it’s benign.

So, paper or plastic, what’ll it be?

Source: Gencraft AI.

Paper, please. If my choice is between eating little bits of plastic, and eating little bits of sawdust, I’ll be going with sawdust for a while.

First things first. How many wooden cutting board do I already own?

Before dashing off into this exciting new phase of my retirement, I decided to take a Marie Kondo challenge: I found all my wooden cutting boards and put them in one place.

I already has five disused wooden cutting boards, sitting around gathering dust. Several of which I was surprised to see. (Plus two more that I just picked up at my local thrift shop. Including one bamboo board. Just because.) The upshot is that to make the switch to wood, I just had to start using any of the many wooden cutting boards I already owned.

It was a motley crew.

I learned a lot just by looking at them

Rule 1: The best way to preserve your wooden cutting board is to buy one that’s too nice to use.

Above: Good domestic hardwoods, fine craftsmanship, and the maker stamped his name on it. Do I really want to put knife cuts in that?

Some of these wooden cutting boards were in pretty bad shape, some weren’t. The ones in bad shape weren’t bad cutting boards, they were just the ones that had been used. Or abused. Those tended to be plain-Janes, while the “pretty” boards remained pristine because, in effect, they looked too cute to use for every-day food prep.

The flawless 30-year-old cutting boards above are a case in point. The point being, don’t buy a cutting board that’s so nice that you hesitate to use it. Unless you are buying it as decor.

Rule 2: If it’s too much effort to rinse a cutting board under the running faucet and wipe it down with a soapy sponge, then don’t use a wooden cutting board.

That’s neither here nor there, as a measure of moral fiber or kitchen rectitude. You just need to know what kind of person you are, and don’t try to pretend to be something else.

One of my boards was a beautiful, big, beefy carving board that is an open-and-shut case of death by dishwasher. (I now recognize the tell-tale signs of that, courtesy of a trip to my local thrift shop — where old cutting boards go to die.) This one can’t be used as a meat-carving board, because the juices now run onto the table, through the failed wood joints created by putting this in the dishwasher.

If you know your fine woodworking, heat-and-moisture is what you use if you intend to disassemble a glued-up wooden object. Just ponder that the next time you’re tempted to toss a wooden cutting board in the dishwasher.

Rule 3: Do not use boards outside of their intended purpose.

One of my kitchen boards is a kneading board. That is, it’s purpose is to be used as a surface for kneading dough, not for cutting. (You can’t say “bread board”, because that term also gets used for things like pizza peels and charcuterie boards. Not to mention hobby electronics.)

This particular one is maple, bearing deep slashes in the aftermath of this project (Post #927, A wheelchair floor-to-chair aid, V3). It will take a lot of power sanding to return this to being a usable two-sided kneading board.

But I probably (ab)-used it with the idea we were never likely to need it again, as a kneading board. As nobody in the household now bakes bread. So I’m not sure it’s worth fixing.

Rule 4: Not all bamboo boards are bad. This one simple trick changes everything!

It seems as if all the cheap wooden cutting boards offered on Amazon are bamboo. (If you will allow me the leeway to classify bamboo as “wood”.)

Separately, I spotted numerous damaged bamboo cutting boards at my local thrift shop, on my first board-related visit there. Putting two and two together, I’m guessing that most bamboo cutting boards are not made to last.

But, upon closer examination, based on one day’s sample of boards at my local thrift shop, there appears to be a right way, and a wrong way, to make a bamboo cutting board.

Better bamboo boards are layered, with a central core, like plywood. They have an odd number of layers, with the strips running at right angles to each other in alternate layers. These tend to hold up quite well, based on what was on the shelf at the thrift shop. In fact, I bought (and am happily using) one of those, from that thrift shop.

Broken broken bamboo boards were all made by simply gluing strips of bamboo side-by-side. No central core. Just lots of thin strips, held together with glue. So that if one of those many glue joints failed, the board ended up in the thrift shop, on its way to the landfill.

Best guess, the broken boards had been subject to a bending stress oriented across the glue lines. (By being dropped, say). The thinner the board, the more leveraged those bending stresses are. (E.g., think about gluing Popsicle sticks side-by-side. You could use the best glue in the world, and you still wouldn’t be able to make a strong board that way.)

But I would not rule out death-by-dishwasher, bamboo-style.

The upshot is that thin bamboo boards without a central core are probably best avoided. Likely, the thinner, the less robust. I have only anecdotal evidence, but I view their basic construction as a risking premature failure, if for no other reason than the potential for forces that would snap the board along a glue line.

By contrast, so far, I couldn’t be more pleased with the bamboo board I bought and am currently using. Mostly, it’s light, hard, and seemingly easy to clean. It is my go-to for vegetable chopping. We’ll see if it lasts.

Rule 5: Sanding atones for many (but not all) sins.

By widespread agreement, deep cuts in the surface of a cutting board are bad. Any cutting board, wood or plastic. They look bad. Worst case, they trap food particles. So from the standpoint of looks and sanitation, you should do something if your board has many deep cuts in it.

No clue how deep “deep” is. Not sure what “many” means. More or less, you know it when you see it.

In theory, if you have a wood cutting board, all you have to do is sand down the surface, and you can “remove” those knife cuts. (What you actually remove is all the wood that’s higher than the bottom of those knife cuts.) The result should be a smoother (but ever-so-slightly slimmer) version of the board.

How hard could this be? I have power tools, sandpaper, and some rudimentary woodworking skills. And mineral oil. You start with the coarse grit, you end with the fine grit. Then dust it, and oil it.

A couple of hours later, here are the results on three boards that I thought could use a good sanding.

Thrift shop rescue: Success. Something about this board said “take me home”, so I did. Nice size, big wood pieces, very solid. But very cut-up. And yet, the very factor that got it so cut up — the soft wood — make it quick to sand down to smoothness again. I stopped before I erased the deepest cuts, because it seemed inefficient to remove so much wood for so little incremental benefit.

Not perfect, but perfectly usable. I still have no firm idea what the wood is. Note that sanding and oiling actually brought out some flaws in the wood, circled above. Even though it removed almost all the scratches and cuts.

Cherry wedding present: Success. I’m still not quite sure what wood this is made from, but it’s at least 30 years old, gets significant use during the course of the year, and cleaned up nicely with a heavy sanding.

Again, not returned to like-new condition, but definitely a win. It’s a nice usable cutting board, I’m happy to see a less distressed surface on it.

Kneading board: Failure. The cuts (gouges, really) were deep, the wood is hard (maple), that I gave up before I got them sanded out. So it’s still a mess on one side.

I would say this needs to be run through a planer, but it’s not flat — it has a pronounced cup. Harmless in its intended use as a kneading board, but it’ll be a very thin board by the time that cup shape is shaved flat.

It’s now a one-sided maple kneading board.

I oiled all the boards with food-grade mineral oil. Because They say I should do that frequently, and to my absolute certain knowledge, I’ve never oiled any of these boards, despite using some of them off-and-on for decades. Far as I know, there’s nothing magic about mineral oil. It provides the wood with some protection from water, and it doesn’t go rancid as it sits on board.

Just say no: A brief interlude on rejected types of cutting boards.

Glass, stone, and metal cutting boards are too hard, and quickly dull your knives. I see no disagreement about that from trusted information sources. That lines up nicely with estimates that tempered glass is as hard or harder than most steels.

Here’s advice from America’s Test Kitchen:

First: Do not buy a glass or metal cutting board. Please, please, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t buy these boards. We know they’re pretty, but they will roll the edges of your blades within a few cuts, rendering them dull.

Source: America’s Test Kitchen.

Trendy new “wood fiber” or “wheat straw” cutting boards caught my eye as being every bit as functional as plastic cutting boards. But if you dig around a bit, you’ll find out that’s because they are plastic cutting boards. The natural cellulose material is bound together with “resin”, ad-speak for plastic. If I recall the chemistry right (“phenolic”), this is essentially a piece of Formica countertop.

(Before I found that particularly product write-up, I never quite grasped why anyone would advertise a wooden surface as “BPA free”. Wood doesn’t contain BPA. Now that makes sense. I’m skipping these, given that I’m doing this to avoid chopping up my food on a plastic surface.)

That leaves wood.

And its poor relation, bamboo.

And now, an extended rant on bad internet-based advice on cutting boards, or, why you should ignore the conventional wisdom on proper cutting board construction, and just buy what meets your needs and looks fairly sturdy.

The problem with wood cutting boards …

Source: Etsy.

… is not keeping them sanitary. Avoiding bacterial cross-contamination is easy.

This should come as no surprise, as wood cutting boards have been used for centuries, at least. Sure, they predate the germ theory of disease. And yet, you’d figure that if they caused problems, somebody would have noticed by now.

Turns out, if you let the wood fibers dry, they kill bacteria with an amazing degree of efficiency. Wood surfaces are, in effect, self-sterilizing as they dry out. Here’s a typical bit of research. You can find many more like it.

The upshot is that a wooden cutting board presents no more risk of bacterial cross-contamination than a plastic cutting board. Possibly less. That’s true whether the wood is untreated, or treated with mineral oil (a typical surface treatment used to reduce water absorption by a wooden cutting board.)

But if you don’t believe me, consult the USDA. The USDA is extremely conservative when it comes to food safety. If they could have found a significant fact-based reason to avoid wooden cutting boards, they would not have been shy about telling you.

On the one hand, you have this reference. There, the USDA says that as long as you keep your cutting board for meat separate from your cutting board for other stuff, clean with hot soapy water, and allow to dry, you “may” use them. On the other hand, you can read this link, where the USDA suggests harsher treatment, including running them through a dishwasher and dousing them with bleach (to which woodworkers the world over say NOOOO).

But the bottom line is that wooden cutting boards are acceptable for sanitary food prep, as long as you do things like wash them, let them dry, and don’t cut up other stuff on the same board you just used to cut up raw meat. None of which is materially different from proper treatment of a plastic cutting board.

The USDA also notes that deep cuts can trap food particles, so they recommend that you do something about it if your wooden boards get too scratched. Also, based on their testing, bamboo may be superior to most woods, for use as a cutting board.

One potential downside to wood cutting boards is that, based on some source, wood can in theory pick up and retain food odors. I’ve never had that happen — at least not to the point where I’d notice it after washing the board. So I’m just not worried about that.

In short, clean your wooden cutting boards with warm soapy water, let them dry between uses, and they are as sanitary as any of the alternatives. As with any cutting board, you don’t want to re-use a wooden cutting board immediately after processing raw meat. You must allow it to dry between uses, because something about those dry wood fibers destroys surface bacteria.

No, the real problem with wood cutting boards …

Source: Clipart library.com

… is that on-line discussion of them is absolutely dominated by snobs.

This topic attracts a toxic combination of knife snobs, cooking snobs, and woodworking snobs. (Or enthusiasts, if you prefer). The result is that online discussion only focuses on the best, purest, and most over-the-top forms of the cutting board art. Worse, there’s a subtle tone of one-upsmanship in threads about cutting boards. Within a given discussion, each snob feels obligated to out-do all prior snobs in terms of the exacting standards to which an acceptable cutting board must adhere.

Source: Etsy, Etsy, Etsy, Etsy.

The result is that if you want advice on purchasing a beautiful piece of wooden artwork, they’ve got you covered. Need a once-a-year showpiece for the Thanksgiving turkey? Require nothing short of end-grain butcher block construction, for the kitchen knives that you’ve honed to razor sharpness? Don’t mind owning a cutting board that requires two people to lift? Then you can find all the on-line help you need.

But that’s not what I’m after, for chopping celery in my kitchen. I want a modest-sized, lightweight cutting board. Not a work of art. And there’s scant expert advice out there for people like me.

No, I mean the real problem with advice on wooden cutting boards …

… is that almost all the “facts” that are endlessly repeated by cutting-board snobs are dead wrong. It’s folklore. Old wives’ tales. Virtually none of what you’ll hear from self-appointed cutting board experts stands up to even the simplest empirical testing.

Quick quiz: Who do you think is more likely to win the contest above? And/or, why did knights practice with wooden swords, but fight with metal ones?

Just to give you a sample, every knife fanatic knows — absolutely rock-bottom knows — that you must use end-grain cutting boards, because other orientations of the wood are much harder on your knives. Anywhere you look for expert advice, that’s what you’ll be told. And that’s why you see so many cutting boards made of little square-ish chunks of wood glued together. They do that to expose the ends of the boards to the knife, not the sides.

And god help you if you even think about cutting across the top surface of a board. You barbarian. You’re destroying the edges of your knives if you do that.

But, as it turns out, that’s simply wrong, based on actual tests. So says America’s Test Kitchen (referenced above). And so says Knifegrinders.com (Google link to .pdf), who went to the trouble of using a calibrated sharpness tester to look into the issue. Knives don’t dull quickly when used on wood cutting boards — any wood cutting boards — and the orientation or type of wood appears to make almost no difference.

Question: How do plastic and wood cutting boards compare in terms of hardness? Took me a while to find it, but they’re roughly equally hard. These folks show a wooden ruler (which I interpret as “Maple”) as 70 Shore D hardness. Maple is a fairly hard wood, and is a common choice for cutting boards. This site shows HDPE plastic as 62 Shore D hardness.

This matches an otherwise puzzling finding from America’s Test Kitchen. They found that their knives dulled equally rapidly on plastic or wood cutting boards. Which, to me, suggests that the two are roughly equally hard, on average.

Similarly, everyone says that bamboo is too hard to make a good cutting board. Again, it’s supposedly too hard, and so it’ll dull your knives faster. Everybody, that is, except those who have tested it, and found that to be … well, wrong. Bamboo may or may not be harder than the typical cutting-board wood, but empirically, it does not appear to dull knives materially faster than wood.

This makes perfect sense to me, because even the hardest wood is vastly softer than a stainless steel kitchen knife. I found exactly one thread where a seemingly knowledgeable individual converted the Janka scale (for wood hardness) to the Brinell scale (for metals), on arborsite.com. Based crudely on that calculation, hard maple would come in around a three on the Brinell (metal hardness) scale, the hardest known wood in the world would come in around eleven on the Brinell scale, versus stainless steel at around 200 on the same scale.

So, sure, it’s easier to slide a knife across the end grain of a wood than it is to press it into the surface. But from the knife’s perspective, both materials are soft enough that it just doesn’t seem to matter, in the course of ordinary food preparation.

In essence, the same reason you should not use glass cutting boards from the knife-user’s perspective — glass boards are quite hard, compared to stainless steel knives — is exactly the same reason you may feel free to use any wood or bamboo cutting board — they are all vastly softer than stainless steel.

Plus, it’s just not that hard or time-consuming to keep kitchen knives adequately sharp. I went with this idiot-proof device below, a few years ago, and I’ve never looked back.

Given that, I could not quite figure out why I should obsess about having only the finest in wooden cutting boards.

The only valid argument I read for using glued-up end-grain cutting boards is that they hide the knife cut marks better. To me, that has the ring of truth (based on having done a limited amount of hobby woodworking), so if the look of the board is paramount, and you actually plan to use it a lot, and you are unwilling to sand out the cut marks every few years, then end-grain is what you should choose.

Otherwise, for the rest of us, the best evidence is that none of the fine points of fine cutting board materials and construction make any material difference whatsoever to the average kitchen user.

Revelation! I am liberated.

Source: Lesfleurs.com. For whatever reason, the French seem to dominate the market for antique cutting boards.

Turns out, a wooden cutting board is a wooden board. That you cut stuff up on. All the rest is detail. Most of which does not much matter.

Stupid as that sounds, you’d be hard pressed to arrive at that conclusion from any on-line discussion or advice on this issue.

For me, the final nail in wooden cutting board coffin was this: If you listen to the experts, you must use only selected fine-grained hardwoods and yada yada yada. But in practice, not only does it make more-or-less no practical difference how the wood is oriented, you can use just about any old wood you please*, and you’ll end up with a serviceable cutting board.

On Amazon, without even trying, I came across boards made from:

Maple
Teak
Walnut
Cherry
Acacia
Rubberwood
Neem
Sapele

So I kicked that up a notch and just started Googling “cutting board” plus any random wood species that popped into my head. And immediately found kitchen cutting boards made from:

Redwood
Cedar
Tulip poplar
Pine
Ash
Hickory
Mahogany

These are woods with widely varying properties and hardness. But the fact is, I never found a common species of wood, for which there is some commercial timber market, from which I couldn’t find a cutting board, made by somebody, offered for sale.

* Within reason. My wife mentions that oleander wood is poisonous. Similarly, there are anecdotes of unknown quality regarding allergic reactions from (e.g.) use of walnut or other nut woods in cutting boards. (Others dismiss that by noting that the allergens in (e.g.) nuts are found in the fruit, not the wood of the tree.) And, for sure, I would not want to cut up food on eastern red cedar, for fear the food would smell like a cedar chest. Similarly, I’d probably avoid camphor wood (frequently used in the East as red cedar is used in the West.) And so on. Any wood you please, within reason.