Japanese Rubber Cutting Boards Chefs Love

this video is brought to you by birth faction and Perfection store can I sponsor my own video when you have some time please visit refreshingstore.com and there you can find all of my favorite Japanese knife makers as well as knives I have designed myself all right well enjoy the review by the way my home so my kids wanted to decorate the home and because my new filming area is in the living room that we don't use all that often my kids decided to overtake my room and they said Daddy your filming area either has to go or our decoration is going right through it they're really sweet about it they really love decorating and so I let them decorate the home however they like if you guys have followed my channel for some time you'll know that I used to use a lot of thick wood cutting boards and I've moved away from that mainly because I've been getting more into raw foods like sushi and you know prepping more raw meats on my cutting boards and so I wanted a board that is easy to move around the kitchen to wash I've been using these Asahi boards now in my home for uh I would say about six months or so and before that I had the hasagawa cutting boards and a number of off-brand off-brand makes of different types of rubberized cutting boards now during my travels in Japan I've noticed whenever I go to a sushi restaurant there are really three types of cutting boards that are used it's either hasagawa Asahi or some form of hinoki cutting board hinoki is a wood cutting board but it's used in sushi restaurants because the wood has a lot of resin and fused in it or a natural resin in the board and so it kind of makes it water repellent not necessarily waterproof but definitely water repellent and it's a really nice cutting board I've actually owned a couple of them here I posted a video I want to say a year a year and a half ago probably closer to a year and a half ago to two years with a comparison between the standard boards so this is a standard board so I'll kind of give you a conclusion of the standard boards at the end of the video but they're fine board if you want to see the complete review of this board go to the video which I will link in the video description you can hear all about this board first of all the quality of these boards are they're very very high I don't have anything negative to say about them so this one here is the thin one I got a 15 millimeter board and this is a this size here is uh five 500 millimeters by 250 which is a 17 and three quarters by nine and three quarters and what's really nice about pretty much all of the sahi bores is their ratio so they have what we call or what I call a two to one ratio so the length of the board or the width if you're using it this way is twice the size of the depth and that's really important for a number of reasons the first one is if you live in a home that's very small sometimes when you buy a board that is only let's say nine inches nine inches deep oftentimes in a western store say you go to your local retailer here the ratio is probably closer to like a three to four Ratio or sometimes a 9 to 16 ratio so if you have a nine inch deep board the width of the board may only be 15 or 16 inches and so by having a ratio of two to one you're bored the real estate you can get is actually quite nice even if you don't have a very deep area to work with so I really enjoy the fact that these boards are made with that two to one ratio this material that they're using is very smooth this is a it's a block of rubber which is really nice and it's not really I wouldn't call it flexible you can see there is some Flex in it just not a whole lot so it is a fairly dense I'm sorry about that if it is a fairly dense material and what's also interesting is the wood you can see the wood particles in this board here if you were to flip this over to the cleaner side and you look really closely you'll see wood particles or darker spots all throughout the board and that's basically the mixing the mixture of wood particles you know wood shavings or I would say yeah just wood particles and rubber and then they lay all this out into a nice big sheet and then they'll cut it out to whatever size they want and that allows them to basically give you an infinite range of sizes which is really nice if you want to customize what you want for your home for your restaurant so this is the exact same size board as the 15 millimeter board but it's 20 millimeters thick this is where I see the value of the Asahi boards really start making sense as far as the premium grade boards this is when the cut quality and the sound quality while you're cutting makes it much more pleasurable to use being such a thin board the 50 millimeter board will kind of reflect a lot of the energy that you cut or you input into the board back to you the 20 millimeter boards will absorb a little bit more of the energy and the sound that you get while you're cutting is a little bit deeper it's more thumpy and less clackety if that makes any sense and I did do a cut test a little while back when I was making some daikon and some onions so if I can if I remember while I'm editing this video to actually put those clips in right now you can hear exactly what they sound and I'll label the videos or label the clip so you know exactly what you're listening to [ __ ] ing [Applause] foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] I happen to clean these boards with anything other than a regular hard I wouldn't call it hard it's a mesh plastic mesh sponge that I use in my home on the hasagawas after every few months or so I would spray the board down with a bleach a 50 50 bleach and water mixture and it actually whitens the board perfectly and cleans it really really well I haven't done that with this board yet because I wanted to see exactly what it looks like I also spoke to the rapper over at Asahi and they also said to me that these ports here the way they're designed because they are a solid block you can sand these boards down over time so if a board gets too dirty which is kind of what we're seeing here you can actually just take 400 600 grit sandpaper sand the surface down remove a few microns of thickness and you will have a fresh board that's actually a really good selling point I haven't tried that yet because I don't haven't felt the need to do it to this board yet but I will do it maybe for another long-term test video and I'll show you exactly what it looks like this boot here is 600 by 300 and it measures to about 23 and three quarters to 11 and three quarters inch so a fairly large board for for my home this board here you can see is 30 millimeters thick very very thick very beefy definitely heavier than a wood Board of its size and I wouldn't be surprised if this is well yeah this I wouldn't say this is 20 pounds but definitely a 14 15 pounds or so very heavy board and it's really nice okay I have to say if if money was no object this is the board I would say just get if you just want a really nice board and also a few months back I used the largest board that they make which is I think twice the size I want to say it's like four foot wide by two feet deep it's huge I don't know I want to say it was 30 40 pounds or so and I did it um I went to visit the folks over at Riviera seafood club and to have a sushi Sashimi cutting tutorial and that's what we used there and we all love the board unanimously and yeah it was a really nice board oh yeah so I got these blocks here these are block samples color samples of the colors they offer the colors are only optional for the standard versions so they offer blink blink blue pink the cream and the green all very nice colors nice pastel colors nice fall colors I guess you can say and very beautiful the blue is especially nice it just has a really nice glow to it the pink is nice too very interesting I don't I don't know if I'll have this in my home but I can definitely see people loving the pink the blue and the green are really nice tan you know the tan the cream is something that I've always had with rubber cutting boards so I'm used to seeing it and I'm kind of bored with this color but yeah if I had to buy a cutting board for my home long term permanently I would consider the blue or the pink or the blue oh that's a 14 slip there the blue or the green I definitely really really like seeing in these sample sample pieces here but yeah this is all they are just samples so this is the what they call the professional soft thin you can see this is only eight millimeters thick and it's it feels substantially different from the this Pro board when I look at this board here and it compares to the thicker boards the other Pro boards they look different this has a I would say a grippier texture it's a really nice matte finish on this board what's really nice about this board here is that it is quite light it's flexible but when you lay it down it will retain its shape it doesn't have the memory of the bend that you had in it and so it lays completely flat after you bend it I can really see this board being a popular item for those who want to move to a rubber cutting board but don't necessarily want to spend a lot of money for the heavier boards with thicker boards and also this is really great for backyard barbecuers those who want to travel with the board or people who want to travel with a high grade quality board this is a really good option um so let's talk about some of the disadvantages I have found with these boards here that's something that we should definitely explore the first being the obvious is the stain now I don't say that about all the other boards I've used the hasagawas they didn't really stain as much as these boards here but let's just talk about these boards so the staining is definitely something you should consider with these boards it doesn't really bother me as a person who tests lots of boards and lots of knives for me this is expected and it's actually good for me to see if you were to grill a piece of steak and throw it on here which is exactly what I did and I left the grease and the drippings of that meat on this board for I want to say you know 10 minutes while it cooled and then after I cut the meat and I took the meat off I left all of the juices on this board for a good three or four hours now why would I do something like that it's a torture test I know and that's exactly what it was in your home um even in my home after I cook a meal I don't want to sit there and clean the board down I know some of you may want to do that but I've got three kids in the home a dog a wife and sometimes I've got guests over and so I don't want to be cleaning right after I cook and so there will be times where I leave water on my cutting board there may be times there maybe some water on my knives it just depends on what is happening in the home so that's why I left the juices on this board and just to see what happens and you can see it does it will absorb a little bit amount of stain each time you use it and again for me that's not going to bother me so cosmetically that's the biggest disadvantage to these boards feedback and chopping and cutting when you're cutting on these boards how do they feel really nice I initially thought that these were going to be more like a rubber tire where if you were to slash the board you know the rubber May split and leave that obvious scar there these are not quite as soft as you would expect even though they say these are synthetic rubber boards they are very very dense and if you told me that they weren't rubber I would believe you because they are so dense and you cannot bend this board this is the 20 millimeter version you can't bend this board at all I mean you got to put a lot of force onto this board and it has to be really long for you to actually Flex it and bend it so it is a very very highly dense board very hard material my initial fear of these bores was because they are rubber I was afraid that I would damage the rubber as I'm cutting them but not so I use them just like any other wooden cutting boards and they held up just as well to my fast chopping so there were two concerns I want to address from the previous cutting board video was first can you scoop food up with your knife and your hands after you're chopping it the answer is yes this board here there is no fine pattern on this board this is just a perfectly smooth cutting board perfectly smooth surface and so you can literally take your knife and scoop food up there was no problems at all and the other question was do partic you know particulates come up while you're using this board and does it kind of flake and there's a fall apart as you're using it sort of only if you're trying to make materials come off of the board will it actually happen so there were a couple times where the board was wet and I'm taking the edge of my knife I'm scraping the surface of the board and I did notice you know some very very small materials come off of the board onto the knife now again that was because I was trying to when I was doing it at natural speed when I'm cutting onions and scooping onions and just putting into a bowl there was no scraping you know like hard scraping of the knife into the board so I didn't really see that being a problem and my cut test um actually in my cut test and in my kitchen I was finding that the two smaller boards so especially the 15 millimeter thin boards this would slide every once in a while especially if it were any water on the counter normally in the past I've always used the hasagawa the blue really really nice blue mess the hasagawa cells now as far as the material an anti-slip material they are I would say the best I have used for any sort of cutting boards whether it's a wood cutting board or a rubber cutting board it is the grippiest material I've used without being tacky there's only two negatives I have to say about them is first they're expensive and second is that they have these um the pattern that's on them it's these little dots right these little round dots that are like three to four millimeters wide throughout the entire surface both sides of the mat and sometimes if the mat is wider or longer than your cutting board food particles can actually ingredients can actually fall into the cracks and kind of sit there for a while and you can't get it out unless you wash it you may have to wash it and get a little toothpick to pick the foods out so that can't happen with those mats and so unless you have a mat that is the exact same size as your board they become annoying to clean once in a while I figure what other Solutions are there so you can either buy a cheap solution like a really cheap solution at the dollar store you know at or on Amazon for like a couple dollars for those anti-slip mats they're really thin they tend to wear out over time and they kind of just aren't very grippy if you buy cheap mats I went out and bought a roll of silicon silicon masks so I actually found a roll I want to say was five feet wide by 10 feet long for like a hundred dollars or so now this sounds like a lot of money but that's a lot of material and these are really nice they're about one and a half to maybe two millimeters thick so this particular mat here is two millimeters thick yeah two millimeters thick and I bought like I said I guess what what would that be ten by five so 50 square foot of this stuff for about a hundred dollars give or take a few dollars and it has been it has made everything in my home better and so I custom cut them well into any I customize them into any size I want and so this is what I use for my larger cutting boards and this was for something I used in my garage I was doing some stuff on my workbench and I didn't want the workbench getting cut or um like stained so I cut one of these sheets and I put it on my workbench and did my work there matter of fact one of my workbenches that I use for my garden has this on the entire surface of the workbench and so water will not penetrate through and all of my work on it the pots that I use to garden with none of it rolls off the tools I can throw the tools right onto the bench without wearing it banging onto the table it's a really fantastic material and so that's what I would recommend you getting I mean you can obviously go and buy a special matte made for cutting boards like by the hasagawa ones but for everyday use and for multiple use cases getting yourself a nice silicon roll and cutting whatever you need is a much more economical and better utility for your home so that's what I use for my kitchen so that's what I recommend I don't sell these I don't make them or sell them so I you can probably get them on Amazon that's where I got them that's a really really good tool to have and if I do find the link for these things I'll leave it linked in the video description but yeah that's that's my Spiel on anti-slip mats so let's talk about who these are for let me pull this board here and bring it back into the picture this is a standard it's um been used for a few weeks in my home and just kind of as a refresher for me you can see it's got some use this is the new side this is the used side it's got some discoloration but not a whole lot and I was cleaning it this morning and you can see that even though it was only cleaned this morning like a half an hour ago you can see it's completely dry and if you do to do the same thing with these Pro boards they stay moist I wouldn't say they say wet but the surface of these boards do absorb a little bit of water and the water will stay there for a few hours they take a few hours for that water to evaporate and so that's also the other difference between the standard boards and the pro boards the standard boards do not absorb any water at all they I believe they are a rubber board they are rubber but they are of the densest quality of rubber and probably a lower grade quality because they're not as soft as the pro boards but they're quite nice and the other the only negatives I have about these boards here the non-proboards by Asahi is the they're loud when you're doing quick chops like the way I cut they're very very loud uh if that wasn't your cutting style if you just do a lot of rolling on your Cutting Edge on the nice belly these boards are great because they help retain The knife's Edge really well almost as well as the pro boards it doesn't absorb water it doesn't absorb stains and it comes in different colors so that's a bonus there for the non-pro version so between the 15 millimeter 20 millimeter and the 30 millimeters who are they for do I recommend them are they worth your money ah okay so that's a hard one to answer because I do think that if you want to preserve your knife's Edge the year you know these and the hasagawas are probably the two best boards I've used in terms of edge retention for your knives um these I've been at home like I said for about six months the knives I'm using have been in my home for like seven or eight months and they I can't say they feel exactly as sharp as the day I got them or the day I brought them into my kitchen but the knives are still very sharp and I'm sure that has a lot to do with the cutting boards I'm using and that was the same thing with the hasagawas the knives I was using during that time really didn't dull all that much relative to when I was using my wood cutting boards um again that's objective I haven't done any objective testing on that so you know take it how you want to take it 30 millimeter boards I would say if you are in a restaurant setting in a professional setting and you have obviously have the money then the 30 millimeter boards will make sense because you don't have to move them a whole lot right that's the really the biggest disadvantage I see with the 30 millimeter boards and most of the time in my home when I clean my boards it's with a 50 50 solution of vinegar and water and I just sprayed the entire surface down wipe it down but there are times when food are crusted or like baked materials or a powdered flour and water will sit here and they kind of crust you do have to bring that to the sink and wash it so so there are times when I do have to bring this to the sink and that's when I don't want to be carrying a 30 millimeter board around the 20 millimeter board gives me all of the advantages of The Cutting performance of the 30 millimeter thickness but in a much lighter weight now for the 50 millimeter board it's it's a nice it's a nice step up from your plastic cutting boards that you may have been using even though it is using the same materials as the other pro versions it is thinner and that thinner material that thinner thickness does send a lot of energy back to the user when you're doing Quick Cuts so that's only negative I find about this board here is that you're not really getting the full benefit of the material because of how thin the board is I don't I don't recommend against buying this board I would just say that if you were to if you were conflicted between the 50 millimeter board pro version versus a thinner version I would say the standard version will do 95 percent of the job of the pro version because it is it's only a tad bit louder than the pro version but other than that they feel very similar to me at least you know in my use case and uh this to me was again the biggest surprise this was a board that I really liked using and I didn't think I would like the eight millimeter thick version that much because of how thin it is but after using it this is a product I really enjoy using it's easy to use it comes in a number of sizes it's light it's flexible not that I would ever Bend this I mean if you had to like throw some pots and pans on it and carry it to the car that's fine I would never try to squeeze this board past what this is here but it's um it's just a very unique product and it lays flat after a few seconds of putting it on the counter or on any sort of work surface and it's ready to go is it my favorite product in terms of the material I would say that the material that's on this board is my favorite it feels the nicest it has a really nice texture it's matte finish uh it's softer it actually feels softer than the other Pro boards that we got down here it absorbed cutting Force fairly well I did you know I did plenty of fast chopping on this board and I never felt like it was setting too much of the energy back to me so it's a very interesting material I do like this board a lot I have to admit in my opinion the 20 millimeter board would be the way to go if you were choosing between one of the pro boards between the 15 millimeter 20 millimeter and the 30 millimeter I find that this 20 millimeter is the best value overall it offers all of the performance gains of the 30 millimeter without the the the energy feedback of the 50 millimeter when you have some time please visit refreshingstore.com and there you can find all of my favorite Japanese knife makers as well as knives I have designed myself so if you guys have a chance please visit the store and let me know what I can do to improve the store all right well thank you for being here and I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Burrfection

Views: 112,384

Keywords: parker asahi, rubber cutting boards, best cutting boards for knives, rubber boards, hasegawa, asahi

Id: dZQxf9f4CZo

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022