The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

(polyethylene) and wood are the only ones you should
consider. A glass cutting board is like death to your blade:
slow, painful, agonizing death as, stroke after stroke, the
perfect edge that you worked so hard to achieve is
relentlessly worn away. A few years back, if you’d asked a
health expert which type to use, they would have said
plastic, not wood. Plastic is inert and inhospitable to
bacteria, they’d say, whereas wood can house dangerous
bacteria and transfer them to your food.
Turns out those health experts were wrong. A number of
recent airtight studies have shown that wood is actually less
likely to be a means of transferring bacteria, due to its
natural antimicrobial properties. A wooden cutting board
can be a death trap for bacteria. So long as you give it a
scrub and a thorough drying after each use (which, of
course, you should do with plastic boards as well), it’s a
perfectly safe material.
As for its actual function as a cutting surface, wood also
takes home the gold, with some modern plastic boards
coming in a close second. Wood is very soft, meaning that
your knife can make great contact with every stroke, but it
also has some self-healing properties—stroke marks will
close up and fade away (though with repeated use, your
board will become thinner and thinner).
I’m lucky enough to have a few large, heavy, butcher-
block–style boards, which I received as a gift from an old
chef of mine, that exactly fit my prep area. The best
commercial models I’ve seen are the ones made by
Ironwood Gourmet. They have a 20-by-14-inch version for
about $50 that’ll last you at least half a lifetime. Don’t have