Bamboo Cutting Boards: All You Need to Know

Bamboo cutting boards: All you need to know (and more)

I am a big fan of slowly transforming my home into something that barely leaves an environmental footprint. I’m a huge fan of bamboo products – and I have probably spent 1000s of dollars just over the last year on bamboo products.

About a week ago, I decided to throw out my old plastic cutting board. I wanted to replace it with something fresh and eco-friendly. That was the start of a journey where I literally spent 10-15 hours research all types of cutting board material, the best way to clean them, which knives that were good…it was just a rabbit hole.

However, it was a rabbit hole that left me with a lot of knowledge about bamboo cutting boards – and this article is written in order to pass that information on to you guys.

Let’s start with the best products I could find on Amazon.

Bamboo Cutting Boards: All You  Need to Know

Table of Contents

In a hurry? These are the best bamboo cutting boards on Amazon

Winner
GREENER CHEF Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board - four different sizes
Premium size
Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Juice Groove - Meat Cutting Board - Serving Platter Cheese Board - Chopping Board - Butcher Block 17.5x13.5"
Bargain!
Bamboo Cutting Board for Pro Chefs - Extra Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen with Juice Drip Groove - Best Sustainable Organic Wood Chopping Board For Eco-Friendly Cooking (XL: 18 x 12 Inches)
Organic Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Lifetime Replacements - Extra Large Wood Cutting Board - Bamboo Chopping Board for Meat Cheese and Vegetables - Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen
Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Juice Groove - Meat Cutting Board - Serving Platter Cheese Board - Chopping Board - Butcher Block 17.5x13.5"
Bamboo Cutting Board for Pro Chefs - Extra Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen with Juice Drip Groove - Best Sustainable Organic Wood Chopping Board For Eco-Friendly Cooking (XL: 18 x 12 Inches)
$25.99
$31.99
$21.97
Winner
GREENER CHEF Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board - four different sizes
Organic Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Lifetime Replacements - Extra Large Wood Cutting Board - Bamboo Chopping Board for Meat Cheese and Vegetables - Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen
$25.99
Premium size
Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Juice Groove - Meat Cutting Board - Serving Platter Cheese Board - Chopping Board - Butcher Block 17.5x13.5"
Extra Large Bamboo Cutting Board with Juice Groove - Meat Cutting Board - Serving Platter Cheese Board - Chopping Board - Butcher Block 17.5x13.5"
$31.99
Bargain!
Bamboo Cutting Board for Pro Chefs - Extra Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen with Juice Drip Groove - Best Sustainable Organic Wood Chopping Board For Eco-Friendly Cooking (XL: 18 x 12 Inches)
Bamboo Cutting Board for Pro Chefs - Extra Large Wooden Cutting Boards for Kitchen with Juice Drip Groove - Best Sustainable Organic Wood Chopping Board For Eco-Friendly Cooking (XL: 18 x 12 Inches)
$21.97

If you trust me: go on. Feel free to buy one of these.

But I understand if you would need a bit more information about each and every one of them.

Heck, I wouldn’t believe some random guy online that recommended some cutting boards that I had never heard of. 😉


Overall winner: Organic Bamboo Cutting Board

This was the cutting board I ended up buying. It comes in four different sizes – and it got some brilliant reviews on Amazon.

Several things made me buy this bamboo cutting board:

  • It protects my expensive knives
  • It’s made out of 100 % bamboo
  • It has a thin stripe on the edge of the board, which will reduce the risk of any vegetable/meat juice ending up in my kitchen

A solid cutting board.


Extra Extra Extra Large: Juice Groove Cutting Board

This cutting board has many of the same features as the winner.

However, it’s too big for me. I live in a small apartment and don’t need a bamboo cutting board that can fit a thanksgiving dinner. 😉

I haven’t tried this cutting board myself, but I was quite impressed by all the good recommendations on Amazon.


Great budget option: Bamboo cutting board by Traveled Table

If you can get a bamboo cutting board of high quality in this price range…why not just go for it?

To be honest, the size was the only thing that kept me away from buying this one. And I’m sure I would be equally happy with it as the one I bought.

However, my small kitchen could not handle a cutting board that’s 18 x 12 inches. But maybe your kitchen is bigger? 🙂


What to have in mind while shopping for a bamboo cutting board?

While doing research for this article, I was thinking to myself: hmm, why don’t I get a new bamboo cutting board myself?

And so I did. This is the result after spending more than ten hours on Amazon to check reviews, other websites’ recommendations, and building a list based on my own preferences. 🙂

If you read below, I’m gonna share more of my knowledge about these cutting boards. I even went through some scientific reports about how certain cutting board materials are easier to clean….just so you don’t have to.

They might look similar. And it’s a reason for that. All these bamboo cutting boards have these features:

  • They’re quite large (the “winning” product allow you to choose different sizes”
  • Fairly priced
  • Made out of a hard and nice bamboo material
  • Got good reviews online (not only on Amazon but also on Facebook and in various discussion forums – I’ve checked…) 🙂

Bamboo cutting board prices

  • Below 10 USD: Unless you buy a mini-board, you’re not gonna find anything good in this price range. Some of the cutting boards on Amazon claim to be bamboo, but when you dig a bit deeper, you can see that they’re made out of 90 % low-quality wood and 10 % bamboo. These are cheap, but they will also destroy your knives and….destroy your life. Haha.

  • Around 20-25 USD: This is where you should be! Go for a bamboo cutting board that costs between 15-25 USD, and I’d say you’re safe. In this price range, you can literally find cutting boards in high-quality bamboo that has all the features you want. When I began researching this topic, I thought they would be much more expensive…lucky they weren’t.

  • Above 40 USD: I haven’t seen any reason to buy any cutting board for more than 40 USD. I mean…I wouldn’t even buy it if it was made out of diamonds. There are many great options that can be found in the range of 15-25 USD. Some sellers on Amazon desperately try to brand themselves as a “premium kitchen brand”. However, there’s no evidence that these cutting boards are any better compared to cheaper options. They’re just far more expensive.

Part 2: Bamboo vs other materials

In the first part of this article, I told you which bamboo cutting boards that I recommend – and why I recommend them.

But some of you might go:

Hey? He never told us WHY we should go for a BAMBOO cutting board? Wouldn’t it be equally good to buy WOOD or PLASTIC!?!??!

And then I’ll go….well….let me dig into that as well. 🙂

In this part, you’ll learn stuff like:

  • Why bamboo is a better material than other types of wood
  • Why you shouldn’t buy plastic cutting boards
  • And, in the end, I will give you some tips on other home products you can buy to make your home more eco-friendly

Also read: The best bamboo organizers for home and kitchen

Plastic cutting boards – why are they bad?

First of all; plastic cutting boards are made of….plastic.

If you really care about the environment, you would automatically avoid buying plastic products when there are good alternatives out there. You have probably seen some of the news in regards to the extreme plastic pollution problem already.

Most people have already seen the horrific pictures of sea birds making nests out of plastic and seals getting strangled to death by some plastic beer packaging.

However, I would like to update you on how big of a problem this actually is:

1) Scientists have now discovered microplastics inside the thick part of the Arctic ice.

2) 8 million (small and big) plastic items will end up in our oceans every day. Every day!

3) 1 million sea birds are killed annually by plastic pollution. And that number is increasing every year. I’m not saying that there are loads of plastic cutting boards floating around the Atlantic, but you get my point. Everything counts.

You got it now? Don’t buy a plastic cutting board.

Oh…but wait, there’s more!

A lot of people don’t care about the environment at all. Luckily, we got some arguments to why these people shouldn’t buy plastic cutting boards either. 🙂

Less hygienic & more dangerous

Secondly, it was done some studies about the relationship between plastic cutting boards and food hygiene in the 1980s and 1990s. NC State University published an article about this topic some years ago. The conclusion is clear: plastic cutting boards do not decrease the risk of bacteria evolving. It all comes down to the scratches/grooves that are being made while cutting vegetables or meat. The deeper grooves you go, the more difficult it will be to totally clean the cutting board.

And, as you might know, plastic is a much softer material than both wood and bamboo.

A real-life example: my plastic cutting board versus my bamboo cutting board

Nothing is better than a real-life example when you try to illustrate something. And since I bought my first bamboo cutting board, I have not been in doubt: I will never buy a plastic cutting board again.

Not only are they close to being “not functional”, but they also contribute to the big pile of plastic pollution. You can also see how deep scratches they get on the pictures that I have uploaded below.

Anyway. These cutting boards have roughly been used during the same period of time, with the same knives and with the same frequency.

This is how the plastic one looks like:

Plastic cutting board. Big problem.

And this is the bamboo one:

Bamboo. Still in excellent condition.

You can cleary see the difference? It is a pure nightmare to completely clean the one made in plastic. The grooves are simply too deep, and vegetables/meat will always be stuck. The one in bamboo is not a problem to clean at all.

Bamboo versus wood

Let us be very clear. There are only two good options when you are buying a new cutting board. And by “good”, I don’t just mean good from an environmental perspective, but also in terms of quality and hygiene. As you already read, buying a plastic cutting board is one of the worst things you can do for your kitchen. So that option should already be dismissed.

Now, let’s get to this research question: is wood just as good as bamboo as a cutting board material?

Bamboo is actually 19 % denser material than wood. What does that mean when you use it as material to a cutting board? Two things.

1) Bamboo will be stronger and reduce the risk of creating scratches and grooves with exactly 19 %.

2) Your knives will take exactly 19 % more “damage” (I would rather say “wear and tear”) by using a bamboo cutting board.

But just for the record: I have not seen that my kitchen knives have taken any damage from the bamboo cutting board that I bought about a year ago.

Bamboo vs wood: Which one is the best option?

Well. Both are very good alternatives and much, much better than buying plastic. From a personal perspective, I will always choose bamboo products when I got a choice. Simply because I like the material and it is 100 % biodegradable.

Is it anything wrong with using a bamboo cutting board?

Well, no. Apart from the fact that bamboo is a slightly harder material than wood, it appears to be the best alternative when buying a cutting board.

A hot tip is to invest in some high-quality knives for your kitchen. From my perspective, it is quite similar to most aspects of life: you get what you pay for. And I have probably been forced to throw away a lot of knives over the years as they are simply not good made in a quality that I would consider “good” nor “decent”.

What else can you replace in your home to make your home more eco-friendly?

At the beginning of this article, I promised to get back to this bit. It’s important to me to buy products at home that are considered safe, healthy, and eco-friendly.

If you’ve already managed to buy a bamboo cutting board: great. Top notch. You’re on your way.

Over the last year, I’ve done several things that has decreased my overall environmental footprint. These are just some of them:

Furthermore, I started to buy more bamboo products for my home. These are some of the products that I have researched and written an article about:

The concept of constantly trying to buy more and more environmentally friendly products is something that I really believe in. And one day I stood in the kitchen chopping some of my vegetables (yep, the ones that grow in my garden) and thought: “Ouch, this cutting board is made out of plastic!”.

So I needed to do some research. Googled more or less all the phrases that I could in order to figure out:

1) How can I replace my current plastic cutting board? If I had the choice, I would never buy any plastic again…
2) Is bamboo the best option out there when I am buying a new cutting board?
3) What’s wrong with bamboo cutting boards?

FAQ – Frequently asked questions

✅Are bamboo cutting boards good?

Yes, they are brilliant.

Strong, doesn’t easily get scratches and, if you buy the right product, also quite cheap. I would recommend bamboo to anyone that is considering buying a new cutting board for their kitchen.

✅Are bamboo cutting boards dishwasher safe?

Most of them are not.

I would strongly recommend you to wash them by hand. Come on – it doesn’t take you more than a couple of minutes. 😉

Plastic cutting boards are the only ones who are 100 % dishwasher safe. But buying plastic will, as described in this article, come with a lot of disadvantages.

✅How to treat these cutting boards?

The good thing about them is that they don’t need much treatment.

Treat them as you would do with any other object of yours. Even though bamboo is a hard material, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a bamboo cutting board can be used as a butcher block. Try to take care of it in a normal way – and everything will be fine.

✅Are bamboo cutting boards bad for knives?

Absolutely not!

Bamboo is a strong material, but almost doesn’t hurt your kitchen knives at all.

4 thoughts on “Bamboo cutting boards: All you need to know (and more)”

  1. Avatar

    Plastic cutting boards can be put in the dishwasher, which makes them much easier to clean. I hate standing there with soap and brush to clean any wooden (even bamboo) cutting board. Seriously, it feels like a waste of time.

  2. Avatar

    So this article tells me that NOTHING is wrong With using bamboo cutting Boards. Noted.

    And yes, I will buy a New Board from Amazon, but I am not sure that I will buy the one you recommend. Maybe you should Write a bit more on this article before you publish?

    In relation to Your other articles on this website, this isn’t too helpful for me 🙂

    1. Avatar

      Hello Gaya, I see that the article has some flaws. 🙂

      I do agree with you. And yes – the title is slightly misleading. There isn’t anything wrong with buying bamboo cutting boards.

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