Kitchen Cutting Boards are Essential at Home

The home kitchen and cooking area is hardly complete without a proper cutting surface like a cutting board.

While the traditional cutting board was made of wood, a modern day cook often cuts both meat and vegetables using a plastic board. At the same time, that plastic board does not readily slide out of the “tradtional cutting board space” in a kitchen base cabinet.

Traditionally, a cook would pull a wooden board or chopping block from a space beneath the kitchen counter. Today, however, a cook might choose to work on a flat board that can fit over the kitchen sink.

Cutting boards make great gifts, because they qualify as something we might not immediately purchase for ourselves. Receiving one as a gift is a real thrill, because you know you will be using it. You can do the ole chop a lot, or you can let portable cutting boards do double duty as hot plates for heated pots and pans.

They can be made from all materials, natural wood, manufactured plastic, marble stone, even glass and metal.

If you go for a wooden one, the best wood for this purpose is a hardwood that is tightly grained (grains are close together) with pores which are small.

Butcher block and wood counters are still popular in some circles. Some people assert that,”you can cut right on them.” While that may be technically true, what you really want is a cutting, slicing, and dicing surface which can be easily cleaned off. Being able to run a small cutting board under a stream of water from the faucet is quite a bit preferable to cutting on something stationary that may or may not get fully clean when you are working to decrease germs on it.

Yet regardless of whether it is wood or plastic for the board, and irrespective of its place in the kitchen, a cutting board needs to be kept clean.There is a documented tendancy by many people not to wash their hands well after handling chicken or other mean, and also not to disinfect the cotting board.

Back in the mid 1990s, one home arts teacher wanted to call attention to that fact. She decided to have her students see first hand the dangers that can lurk on an unclean cutting surface.

Now that teacher happened to know a woman who worked in an infectious disease lab. That teacher’s acquaintance knew how to grow bacteria in a culture dish. She also had in her possession some samples of a new sort of culture medium, one that could detect a potentially dangerous bacterium.

That home arts teacher arranged for that biologist to visit the home arts room on one Thursday in October. That biologist brought with her some culture plates, plates she had made using the newly acquired medium powder. Using good sterile technique, that visiting biologist carefully divided each culture dish into four different sections.

In some sections, the students placed a sample of skin tissue from a clean hand; in other sections they put a sample of the same tissue from a dirty hand. In a few sections, the students put a sample from a scraped surface–the surface of a cutting board.

Now at the end of each class period, that home arts teacher put the culture dishes on a shelf, a shelf in a warm location. She knew that bacteria from dirty hands would grow on the nutrition filled media. She was curious to see just how much bacteria might grow in the sections with the scraped sample.

By the next time that the same students came to the same home arts classroom, the bacteria had formed colonies in the expected sections on each culture dish. While the colonies that grew from the scraped sample were not as large as those from the dirty skin tissue, that fact was of slight consolation.

The fact that there was any growth at all in sections with a scraped sample indicated the presence of potentially harmful bacteria in one or more places on the classroom’s cutting boards. That indication should have helped that home arts teacher to emphasize the importance of a clean cutting surface.

One young man who assited that biologist on the day of her visit now helps to oversee managment of the kitchen at a private club. No doubt he makes a point of seeing that the personnel in the kitchen do not try any shortcuts, as they set about the task of cleaning each of the cutting boards in that club’s busy kitchen.

How do you clean a cutting board? Washing it off with a dilute mixture of water and bleach is recommended. Putting in in the dishwasher or soaking it in water for a long time could harm the wood.

Technorati Tags: butcher block counters for cutting, chopping blocks, clean a cutting board, cutting board gift, cutting boards, wood counters as cutting surface