I Finally Found a Sturdy Lightweight Wooden Cutting Board
Despite having nine cutting boards in my collection, for a long time I felt something was missing. There’s the rubber one I love in terms of how it feels to cut on but don’t love in terms of its material makeup and lack of a moat. The thin plastic-free, plant-based board is a pretty innovative design, though I prefer something heftier. But my heftiest boards — a huge Boos block, a couple of smaller butcher blocks from Caraway, and an especially beautiful Boardsmith board — are so heavy that I rarely pull them out. They are simply too cumbersome to use regularly. I have a couple of old lighter-weight wooden holdouts from Ikea and Target that I sometimes grab for easy tasks, like cutting a slice of bread, but they’re a bit warped and cracked. What I really needed was a board that felt substantial and high quality but was lightweight enough to be an everyday go-to.
Then, earlier this year, I was cooking at my parents’ house in Los Angeles and pulled out what I immediately recognized as the perfect specimen of a cutting board. Turns out, my mom had been after the very qualities I was and researched until she found this lightweight Teakhaus model. As soon as I got home, I got one of my own.
I’ll note upfront that though it was new to me, Teakhaus is in fact a fairly well-known brand. While I’ve seen a few complaints on Reddit that its regular board has a raised grain after washing, as well as some people saying that it arrived with a smell upon opening (that they also said dissipated in a few weeks), it’s been America’s Test Kitchen’s best board pick for a decade, and there are plenty of people who endorse it. And I can say that in my experience, neither of these complaints were true about the lightweight version.
Teakhaus makes a small-size and large-size version of the board, but I have the medium, which is actually quite big, measuring 18 inches long and 14 inches across. But it’s only one inch thick (or about half-an-inch to an inch thinner than my butcher blocks). It weighs four pounds — kind of a marvel for the size. Meanwhile, for reference, the slightly smaller Caraway I have (left in the photo) weighs double that, and the bigger Boos (right) weighs even a few more pounds.
I’ve found it to be very strong and solid so far. If you prefer an end-grain board, which is generally considered even stronger, Teakhaus has that style, too — though I haven’t tested it, and, as expected, it’s a bit more expensive. As for my edge-grain version, it’s large enough that I can use it for an entire meal, or close to that, chopping and slicing and dicing everything I need comfortably, moving it to the side, then getting going on the next ingredient. It is far and away my favorite to use for butchering or slicing meat as the moat is deep enough to catch juice without running over (not always the case). And then, crucially, when all is said and done, it’s just so easy to pick up, carry over to the sink, wash on all sides, dry, and put away.
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More cutting boards I love
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Pricier and heavier, but a gorgeous special-occasion board.
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Looks like plastic, feels like plastic — but isn’t plastic.
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A unique handcrafted board I think would make a great gift.
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