Choosing a chopping board
It's a no-brainer, surely? If you want a chopping board, just find a piece of wood, and Bob's your uncle! You can happily chop away with a knife and not damage the table or worktop. But in reality, it's a bit more complicated than that. You need to be careful what you are buying, in particular the material that the board is made from.
48 K 4.6/5 (20 reviews)
Keywords for this post:UtensilChoiceCutting materialKnifeLast modified on: May 8th 2012
Choosing a chopping board
Glass or metal:
You will sometimes see chopping boards made from these materials, generally decorated with an embedded photo or graphic design. It's very simple: just don't buy them! Both materials will blunt your knife very rapidly.
A chopping board should be made of reasonably soft material.
Wood
Hmm... It's tempting to go back to natural materials with an old-fashioned chopping board, like those that have been used since medieval times.
This is an appealing idea, but wooden chopping boards have two problems: the knife cuts into the wood easily, so you end up with a certain amount of “sawdust” in the food you are cutting, and wood is porous, so it can hold smells or flavours, even if it is cleaned very thoroughly (this is pretty disastrous if you cut garlic on it, then follow that with pastry for a dessert, for example – just imagine the mix of flavours…).
A chopping board should be resistant to knife cuts.
Synthetic material
This is without doubt the ideal solution: flexible enough to protect the knife edge, robust enough not to be damaged too quickly. It is easy to clean and does not tend to hold flavours or smells.
The synthetic materials fall into two main groups: high-density polyethylene or HDPE, and polyvinyl chloride or PVC. HDPE is more expensive than PVC, but much more resilient and more neutral, so better for our health.
Most of the cheaper chopping boards on sale in the shops are in PVC and these present much the same problem as wooden ones: they are easily damaged by the knife, so you will soon end up with bits of PVC in your food. It is better to be careful and replace any PVC board which shows too many knife marks.
When it comes to the size, it's quite simple: the bigger the better (as long you can find a place to store it in your kitchen, of course). A board about 30 x 30 cm (12 x 12 inches) and 1 cm (½ inch thick) is a good compromise. A large board is comfortable to use as you can cut things easily and push them to the side as you go. This is more awkward with a small board.
If you buy a board in HDPE from a professional cookware shop (expensive, but the quality will be good), you will have a choice of both size and colour, as restaurant kitchens use different boards for meat, vegetables, fish, etc. and these are colour coded (red = meat, green = vegetables, etc.).
To sum up: For your own kitchen, invest in a board in HDPE about 20 x 30 cm (8 x 12 inches).
Lasts posts
Cake moulds
When we make a cake, or a cake of the same rectangular shape, we usually take out our usual mould and tell ourselves that the recipe is anyway "for a cake", but is it really that simple?August 25th 20255055
Thinning out herbs
If you need to add a long-stemmed herb (tarragon, mint, verbena, thyme, etc.) to a recipe, you'll probably only need the leaves and not the stem, so you'll need to remove the leaves. Leaf removal means keeping only the beautiful leaves, and eliminating the ugly stems and leaves, but how do you do...August 8th 20251,1575
Add a bay leaf
Bay leaf: small in size, but big in flavor. You'll find it in hundreds of recipes, and it's often added to cooking meat, in a sauce or broth, usually accompanied by other herbs or products. It's a staple of Provençal, Mediterranean and Oriental cuisine, but not the only one. Usually, in a...July 31th 20251,2485
Parsley stems
Parsley, whether curly or flat, is a delicious ingredient in many recipes, where it is used both raw and cooked. When used raw, in a salad for example, where it always provides, alone or with other herbs, a remarkable freshness, only the leaves are kept. And when used cooked?July 28th 20251,321 13
A drizzle of olive oil
Often in a recipe, you have to "baste" vegetables, for example, before sending them to the oven. What the author means by this is that you need to put oil on top of the vegetables to cook them in the oven. Typically, we just quickly drizzle oil over the vegetables, hoping not to miss any, but...July 13th 20251,5245
Other pages you may also like
Thinning out herbs
If you need to add a long-stemmed herb (tarragon, mint, verbena, thyme, etc.) to a recipe, you'll probably only need the leaves and not the stem, so you'll need to remove the leaves. Leaf removal means keeping only the beautiful leaves, and eliminating the ugly stems and leaves, but how do you do...August 8th 20251,1575
A few tips for effective kneading at home
When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.June 23th 2021277 K 23.7
Cherry clafoutis, with or without pits?
When it comes to cherry clafoutis recipes, there's often a camp of those who argue that you absolutely have to leave the stones in because it tastes better, and the other camp (myself included) who prefer cherries without stones, which makes a much more pleasant clafoutis to eat. But is it true...June 29th 20251,3425
Making the most of seeds: Dry roasting
In cooking, and particularly in baking, there are a lot of seeds we can use, such as linseed, sesame, poppy, etc. Usually, recipes simply say to add them just as they are to the mixture or dough. To make a seeded loaf, for example, prepare a plain bread dough as usual, then, towards the end of...January 30th 201559 K4.0
85 grams of eggs?
Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...November 26th 201852 K4.6
Post a comment or question
Follow this page
If you are interested in this page, you can "follow" it, by entering your email address here. You will then receive a notification immediately each time the page is modified or a new comment is added. Please note that you will need to confirm this following.
Note: We'll never share your e-mail address with anyone else.
Alternatively: you can subscribe to the mailing list of cooling-ez.com , you will receive a e-mail for each new recipe published on the site.