Week 6: The kitchen: tools and surfaces

Chopping boards, choppers, strainers and containers, and their maintenance — including an honest look at what board material actually does to hygiene, knife wear and particle shedding, ahead of week 7's knife.

29 March 2027

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A kitchen’s non-heat tools fall into a small number of categories, each with a job distinct from the others: a cutting board to work on, a chopper to cut with, strainers to separate solid from liquid, and containers to hold what has already been prepared. None of this week’s content is about technique with any of these tools — the knife itself is week 7’s subject — only about the tools and surfaces as objects that need choosing and maintaining.

Board material, compared honestly

Wood, plastic and marble each trade off differently across hygiene, knife wear and particle shedding, and none of the three wins outright.

Wood is kind to knife edges — the surface yields slightly rather than blunting the blade — and a well-maintained wood board is not automatically less hygienic than plastic: wood’s natural porosity can draw liquid, and the bacteria in it, below the surface, away from a subsequent cut, though this depends entirely on the board being dried properly. It requires more upkeep: periodic oiling, and it cannot go in a dishwasher.

Plastic is dishwasher-safe, cheap to replace, and takes knife scarring readily — visible cut marks accumulate and, once deep enough, are harder to clean thoroughly than a smooth surface. It is gentle on edges, similar to wood.

Marble and other hard stone boards are the hardest of the three, so they are the least forgiving to a knife edge, but they shed comparatively little material of their own; they are heavy, can chip, and are mostly chosen for pastry work rather than as a general-purpose board.

What cutting actually does to the board — and the food

Every board sheds some material into whatever is chopped on it. Yadav et al. (2023), in Environmental Science & Technology, measured microplastic release from polyethylene and polypropylene cutting boards during normal chopping and found a substantial number of microplastic particles could be generated and transferred to food this way. Reporting this finding honestly means reporting its limits along with its headline: the same study tested the released particles against cultured mouse fibroblast cells over 72 hours and found no significant effect on cell viability at the concentrations tested, and the authors called for further research rather than treating the question as closed. Both halves of that sentence are part of the finding.

Maintenance

Strainers and containers are maintained by the same basic rule as boards: wash promptly, dry fully before storing, and replace anything whose surface has degraded to the point of trapping food or liquid. For a wood board specifically: wash with hot soapy water rather than soaking, dry standing on edge, and oil periodically with a food-safe mineral or specialist board oil.

Why this sits before the knife

A knife is only as good as the surface it works against. Week 7 covers blade geometry, sharpening and cuts in detail; this week’s board and tool choices set the surface those cuts land on, and a board that dulls an edge faster than it needs to is a preparation cost paid every time it is used, not once.

Outline

Teaching team