Kitchen Basics: Cutting Boards

I recently replaced my ancient cutting board. This is a notable event in that I don't willingly part with good gear, especially gear that has served me well. Kitchenware is not like electronics and so many things in our lives today: it does not become technically obsolete and need to be replaced. Often, the older gear is better than what you can buy today.

My cutting board is something that I use each day, multiple times a day. I often take it for granted. But as I realized when I replaced it with a new board, I had a decent amount of unexpected attachment to it. I'm not super sentimental, but that cutting board and I have been through a lot together and parting with it was cause for some reflection.

Out with the Old

During college when I was broke, I made my first cutting board by recycling an old pine chair bottom. Being a very soft wood subject to rot and staining, pine was largely unsuitable for a cutting board, but it served me until I had some income and could replace it.

I replaced that oddly-shaped pine board some 30 years ago with a thick polyethylene one, the one in the photo above, then quite state-of-the-art and especially difficult to find. Part of my attachment to that board has to do with finding it. Back then, there was no web, no Amazon, and no kitchenware store in every town. Buying restaurant quality gear took a lot of effort, even in a town the size of Washington DC where I lived.

I ended up finding the polyethylene cutting board in New York City on one of my trips up there for business. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the best place to buy kitchenware on the East Coast and perhaps in the country was in midtown Manhattan, just a couple blocks off of Park Avenue. I made it a priority to stop at Bridge Kitchenware on E. 52nd Street every visit to the City.

The owner, Fred Bridge, was a renowned grump. Though he was brusque and efficient in his use of words, he was always tolerant of my questions. His wife Carolyn always seemed more chipper and was usually to be seen somewhere in the store, which had things piled on top of things between things behind other things. Fred had an encyclopedic knowledge not only of esoteric kitchenware, but of where everything was stashed.

The cutting board that I bought in NYC and schlepped all the way back to DC (either on a plane or on the train, I forget) served me well over the years, about 30 of them in fact. But over time, the soft polyethylene developed deep knife wounds that harbored mildew and would stain beyond my ability to bleach it white again. You can see the residual chipotle stain in the upper right quadrant of the board. For these reasons, the then-state-of-the-art soft polyethylene has largely been replaced by harder high-density polyethylene (HDPE).

In with the New

Ultimately, it was the mildew that damned the board to the recycling bin in favor of not one, but four new boards.

The impetus to replace my old friend came from cooking again. After a 2-year hiatus from cooking after I hung up my chef coat, I find myself back in the kitchen a lot. And I'm finding some joy in cooking, something that I thought might never come back, the rigors of restaurant life possibly having killed it forever. But since I retired in May, some of that old desire and passion is coming back, tempered by the desire to spend as much time with my wife as possible and to cook within the limitations of a home kitchen.

And so with renewed purpose, I am making some changes to my home kitchenware in favor of more restaurant-typical gear to which I am accustomed, such as color-coded cutting boards.

Although I am accustomed to HDPE plastic boards in the professional kitchen, I chose a wooden teak board as the primary board for my home kitchen, mainly as an olive branch to my wife.

Ann has this thing about items being on the counter. While I am comfortable having all my gear out and within easy reach like it was in the restaurant, she wants a leaner, cleaner, less industrial look for our home kitchen, and who can blame her? Because I use the cutting board all the time, I would never put it away and that would rankle her. Extending the olive branch, I decided to go with a board that is also a work of art. If it is going to remain on the counter, at least it can look nice, hence the decision to go back to a wooden board.

Ever since working in a professional kitchen, I have been concerned about food safety and cross contamination. With my previous cutting board, I had to be very careful when prepping vegetables and chicken to prep the chicken last, after all the vegetables, and to sanitize the cutting board well when done. We just don't need salmonellosis because of inadvertent cross contamination.

To help with food safety, I also bought three color-coded HDPE boards sized such that they will fit in my dishwasher. After I use them, they go directly into the high-temperature dishwasher. Now, I can forget all about using tons of bleach to sanitize the boards. The plastic boards are also small enough to get stored in the pantry until I need them, which really is not that often as our diet is not based around meat.

I use each of the four boards for food that must be cooked to different temperatures. The teak board is for vegetables and most ready-to-eat foods. The blue board is for seafood, the red for meat, and the yellow for chicken. In this way, I will never have to prep vegetables and chicken on the same board again. And if we have a guest to the house with a seafood allergy, I can guarantee that I will never have sliced scallops on the teak board on which I prepped the ingredients for our salad.

This piece of mind comes at minimal expense: each of the colored boards was about $6 at a restaurant supply house. And in 2020, FedEx brought them straight to my house for a minimal fee. No more schlepping them back from New York City!

The teak board is still so new that I am not used to the feel of my knife on it: wood feels different than plastic. The new board is taller and so I am holding my knife a half inch higher, which feels a bit weird, but not so weird as transitioning from restaurant kitchen counter height to home kitchen counter height. And the new board is louder than the old. Still, in a few thousand cuts, we'll become acquainted and make some new memories.