News — Deer & Oak

If you spend a lot of time in the kitchen, your chopping board quietly does a huge amount of work. It deals with everything from onions to Sunday roasts, and it can make food prep feel either smooth and satisfying or awkward and cramped. So it is no surprise more people in the UK are asking: are bamboo chopping boards better than wooden ones for UK kitchens? The honest answer: it depends what you cook, how you care for your kit and what you value most. Let’s break it down so you can pick the right board for your own...

Cutting boards live at the front line of your kitchen. Raw chicken one minute, strawberries the next. If you want to keep your family safe and your food tasting as it should, choosing bacteria-resistant bamboo or acacia boards is one of the smartest upgrades you can make. At Deer & Oak we specialise in bamboo, carbonised bamboo and acacia, so we spend a slightly ridiculous amount of time thinking about what makes a board both beautiful and hygienic. Here’s how to choose bacteria-resistant bamboo or acacia boards that actually deserve a place on your worktop. Why bamboo and acacia are...

Wooden chopping boards have had a bit of a reputation makeover in recent years. For a long time plastic was seen as the hygienic choice, but as more research has come out, bamboo and hardwood boards have stepped back into the spotlight. That naturally leads to the question many of our customers ask: are acacia boards antibacterial like bamboo[2][3][4]? Do wooden boards really have antibacterial properties? Let’s start with the big picture. Several food safety studies over the years have shown that certain woods can be surprisingly kind to home cooks and surprisingly unkind to bacteria. When you compare wood...

If you care about food hygiene, your chopping board choice is not just about looks. It is about how long bacteria can survive on the surface that touches your dinner every single day. In this article we tackle a question we are asked a lot: how does carbonised bamboo compare with traditional beech when it comes to bacterial survival? What do we mean by “bacterial survival” on boards? When you chop raw chicken, mince or unwashed veg, a small army of microbes is left behind. Some will be washed away, some will die off naturally, and some may hang around...