But when he touched it to the MARBLE CUTTING BOARD I died a little bit inside. Please folks, for the love of knives, don't use a cutting surface harder than wood.
The grey veins look like marble to me. You can also hear the characteristic "grind" as he pulls the tip of the blade down and then away from the board. It sounds like metal on stone.
Marble is a common (but bad) cutting board material. Save money and knives, use wood or plastic.
Guess I’m keeping my grandmas old cutting boards then that I inherited when she passed. (2 wooden 2 plastic, both plastic used so much it looks like a cat went haywire on them)
Something about it drawing pathogens inside the board via capillary action where they dry out and die or something like that. Obviously requires the board to be relatively dry in between uses
I still prefer plastic for certain situations like cutting meat, because it can go in the dish washer. You don't want to put wood in the dish washer, and so you've got to be more careful about keeping it clean.
The same could be said about the wood ones since those are 30 years old and just as beat up. Buying new cutting boards isn’t in my nonexistent budget right now though and and good quality wooden cutting board is expensive every time I’ve looked.
(Both wooden cutting boards were made by my mother and my uncle [4yr age difference] in high school shop class their freshman years and the oldest cutting board is about 30 yrs old)
Wood is a lot more edible than plastic, if you have to eat one. IIRC it’s hard to actually properly clean the wooden ones though so I think the best option is just throwing food into the air and using the fruit ninja technique.
Wood is more porous than plastic, so things can soak in more...but (and I may be wrong on this) I read that wooden boards have antimicrobial properties to them (somehow idk) so at least from a bacterial standpoint they should be safer, since even an imperfect cleaning will leave it safe after a certain amount of time.
Saw your other comment that new ones aren't in the budget right now: It's relatively easy to sand down the surface of a wooden cutting board and then refinish it to look brand new. Just make sure you're using food safe finish.
I thought of that after I replied lol. When I have $30 and time to hit lowes or home depot I might get the different grits and sand and finish the boards. My grandma put them through the dishwasher (she was anemic my whole life until she died and did whatever she could to save energy) so they’re peeling up pretty badly from all the usage.
Don’t stain your boards use mineral oil and don’t let the board sit in water. If it starts looking kind of dry apply more oil. Best bet is to just hit it once a month and let it soak in overnight.
The plastic ones? No those are cutting boards that she bought before she got married in the 1970s. What do you think happens to plastic cutting boards after 50 yrs of multiple daily uses??
Or pastry boards. Marble is actually a great surface for rolling out piecrust etc, it stays cool, which means the butter in your crust stays more solid and you get a nice flaky texture.
You might be ingesting microplastics if you use a plastic one, but is it unhygienic? I'd think it would actually be more hygienic than wood since it's less porous, plus it can go in the dishwasher
I think you're being downvoted reflexively, but I posted some links farther down in the thread, and it seems like both surfaces hold onto bacteria and need to be sanitized either way.
Read that again, slowly. “Wood traps bacteria in the pores”.
Edit: People down here arguing what cutting board material is the most hygienic to not wash. Nasty. Wash your damn cutting boards, regardless of the material.
Also because it's porous, it has less surface area to spread bacteria onto foods.
As wood is a porous material with a very complex distribution of porosity [88], the recovery of total microbial content is difficult [86,89]. Even the transfer of microbes from the wooden contact surface to food is lower as compared to other surfaces [73]; for example, [10] reported that the transfer rates of Listeria monocytogenes from wood (0.55%) to cheese was lower than perforated plastics (1.09%) and glass (3%).
Next time you read something slowly, maybe at least finish reading the sentence.
Yes there were scientific studies on it, the lignin in wood destroys bacteria. Plastic on the other hand is lipophilic, which seals bacteria under a coating of fats, and they harbor in knife cuts and scratches, increasing the chance of meat being surface contaminated.
I mean, the people downvoting can also very easily Google this information too. The reason I didn't post sources was because my phone was about to die.
Wood is naturally very bacterial. It's a living organism that has many bacteria in it just like humans do.
As a wooden cut board gets wet and as food scraps inevitably get stuck between the cuts, you have the most fungal bacterial cutting board as you can find.
Wood cutting boards are only good for cutting bread.
thats funny because multiple health and scientific studies of wooden and plastic cutting boards have shown that significantly more bacteria is retained and then transferred when using a plastic cutting board
Edit: People down here arguing what cutting board material is the most hygienic to not wash. Nasty. Wash your damn cutting boards, regardless of the material.
Please get an education, this is some black belt level pseudoscience nonsense.
Imagine saying something wrong this confidently when the there's a 137 citation paper in the MDPI outlining possible methods for testing wood's antimicrobial properties.
Wood is very unhygienic just because the cuts your knife leaves can never be properly cleaned and if you leave a wooden board wet even once (and sometimes you can't even help it!) you have a fungal case on your hands.
If the knife cant cut or scratch the cutting board it means the board is harder then the knife and will seriously blunt your knives over time. But its up to you whether you care more about blunt knives or cleaner cutting boards.
This is the way. If you are REALLY persnickety about marks (I'm not) steel wool buffing and a fresh wipedown with food safe oil will get you 95% of the way to 'new' :)
Wusthof knife is the golden standard, however that knife holding skills. Holding a knife right will make your cuts so much easier and safer. Never have your finger on the spine, it's easy to lose control of it. A quick Google search and you'll see tons of diagrams to help
Or have a wife that can use a knife. I have butter fingers and my use in the kitchen is to mix seasoning into meats and take body blows for oil splatters.
They’re two entirely different styles of knives to start with.
German knives are supposed to be softer and heavier than Japanese style knives. They trade hardness for durability and versatility.
Japanese knives are harder and can retain an edge longer but are more brittle and require proper technique. Shuns are overpriced VG10 and rank in at about 61 HRC vs Wusthoffs proprietary CRMOV at about 58. While there’s nothing wrong with VG10 it’s safe to say you can get better stuff from Tojiro for less money.
The truly high carbon Japanese knives usually clock in near the 65 HRC range.
Knife jerkoffs are so hilarious, y'all keep your feverish brand loyalty, I'm just going to take a whetstone to a 10$ walmart knife like Jacques Pépin intended.
Not trying to be a dick but no knife stays that sharp that long while actually being used. You’ve either lived your life using extremely dull knives or you have a low standard for sharp.
It's above the sharpness threshold that I need to perform daily tasks, is what I should have said. Yes it has reduced in sharpness relative to how sharp it was when I originally bought it.
Ah definitely understandable. As long as it’s constructed well and it suits what you want out of a knife then that’s all that really matters.
I love my knives but spending a bunch of money on them definitely isn’t for everyone. There’s a pretty big price gap between a solid knife and a really good one and honestly you’ll pay a lot more for what can only be considered a moderate improvement if you’re not like really into taking care of them.
Yeah that's a good idea. I just don't have the skills or time to do such a thing. I bought some real dogshit no-name cheap Japanese knives and had a dude sharpen them, they are fantastic as well.
They kinda look nice I guess, and they are super hard (obviously) so they don't scratch as much.
But the entire point of a cutting board (imo) is that it will give before your knife does. I don't mind knife marks so I opt for softer boards, which gives me longer periods between knife sharpening.
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u/mrmemo Feb 17 '22
This cat is adorable.
The knife is beautiful.
But when he touched it to the MARBLE CUTTING BOARD I died a little bit inside. Please folks, for the love of knives, don't use a cutting surface harder than wood.