Hi all! We’d like to stop using our plastic cutting boards due to cutting little bits of plastic into our food. Unfortunately, the most obvious alternative, wooden cutting boards, are more of a pain to clean.
I’d love suggestions on what I could use instead. I saw there’s a brand called Epicurean that uses some sort of other material that can be machine washed. Has anyone used them before?
I’d especially love something made in Germany or in the EU, but I’m open to looking farther afield if necessary.
Thank you!
I used epicurian for about 5 years. Easy to clean. Dishwasher safe. Very abusive to my knives.
Now I have a maple board for produce only and I use plastic for meat. The plastic boards, I have 2, were $20 or so, and are expendable. As soon as they get beat up (a year), they get replaced. I’m not really chopping on the plastic, usually slicing, so I’m not too worried about micro plastic.
The maple board was a game changer. Knives stay sharp much longer, and it just feels better to cut and chop on. Hard to explain. Cleaning is easy. After use, I wipe with a clean, damp rag, then spray with a 50% vinegar/water solution, let sit a minute, then dry. Once a week (I use it often), I coat with a thin layer of mineral oil. Soaks right in.
I also think bamboo would be too hard on the knives.
I’m not a chef, not in the industry, just a home cook that likes to have the right tools.Holy shit I didn’t realize the epicurean boards were the reason my knives were getting dull!
You can pick machine washable and plastic or you can pick wood and not machine washable.
There are other options out there like glass or composites like Corian. But those are very bad for your knives.
I make wood cutting boards. I use both wood and plastic cutting boards.
Wood is naturally antimicrobial. On the rare case where I feel the need to use something other than soap and water on a wood board I have a bottle of vinegar solution to spray it with. Never use bleach because it will eat away at the wood.
I keep plastic around because sometimes I don’t want to have to hand wash the board. But I prefer wood for the weight and the custom sizes I have made.
The obvious answer is to treat wood cutting boards as single-use and continually buy more from FauxPseudo after each meal.
Don’t laugh - you can buy bamboo cutting boards very cheaply and they grow back quickly.
My brother was willing to try wooden cutting boards based on bamboo being cheap enough that in the worst case scenario they were disposable
If I find out someone abused a board like that then I’d be obligated to put them on the no buy list. I get irked when I find out people use them as display pieces and don’t actually use them.
Honestly, dishwasher safe makes your request essentially impossible. None of the options for that are without their own issues. Composite materials are all built using some form or another of adhesive, and those have the same issues as plastic when it comes to swallowing things that aren’t food.
So you’ve got to pick between light materials like plastic and composites you can shove in a dishwasher, or a wood that’s heavier, but only needs quick washing by hand.
So far, nobody has come up with a solution that’s perfect, though wood products constructed with normal wood glues come pretty close in every respect but weight. Even there, while a decent sized wood board is going to be heavy and awkward to wash, at least it isn’t going to slide around.
wood boards are surrounded by misconceptions and misunderstanding. Some clarifications follow:
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you have to treat and season your wooden board similar to care of cast iron pans. They need to be warmed up, oiled, etc every so often. Grapeseed oil or coconut oil would work.
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machine washing is not applicable to wooden boards but also unnecessary. Treated board has anti-microbial properties so quick wash under sink is all it needs
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any board other than wood (even among woods I’d stay away from bamboo and oaks etc) has negative effect on your knives - dulling and chipping them so you’ve got to select “softer” type, like cherry or maple.
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every now and then you may want to scrape off outter layer of wooden board to “refresh” it or maybe remove the imperfections like cuts and dents
I rarely used anything other than wooden board for the past couple of decades
Better to use mineral oil to condition wood cutting boards since it can’t go rancid.
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Wood.
Not machine washable, but doesn’t need to be.
I like bamboo
