Functional and Good Looking Cutting Boards by Epecurean
I always get a kick out of kitchen counter top reviews that fault a surface
because “you can’t cut on it.” Be it natural or engineered stone, ceramic tile, laminate, stainless steel or wood block a counter top is not for cutting. That’s why cutting boards were invented. A good one should be heavy enough and have enough surface friction to stay in place and hold a food product while it is being cut. The board itself should be hard, but not so hard as to dull or damage the edge of a knife. To do that, the surface has to accept cut lines and scratches gracefully yet look nice through years of hard use. Wood blocks work great and have been around for a millennia, but they are very heavy, hard to really clean and therefore need to be resurfaced now and then.
The Epecurean people make “wood fiber pressed composite” cutting boards
that come close to being the ideal food prep and cutting surface. They are nonporous, dense, sturdy, heat resistant, easily washed and quite attractive. Above all, they are knife friendly. It’s one thing to chop away on a cutting board with a nine inch chef’s knife and quite another to confidently cut and dice with a delicate razor sharp santoku.
They come in sizes as small as 8X6 and as large as 27X17 inches (as above with two 18X13’s on top). We’ve had the smaller ones for a couple of years and just got the large one, which is twice as thick as the others. It has taken up permanent residence on the counter top, replacing a very heavy wood block. They are widely available in good kitchen shops and on the Web. They are rather pricey, especially the larger ones.
