🟧 My fancy cutting board journey

Upgrading from plain plastic to Japanese acetate.

the Kama-Asa Large size cutting board

Kyle Chayka: I have only acquired a single product because of TikTok, but it did cost $130. It started with seeing videos from Musashi, a professional chef in New York City, pop up in my TikTok feed. They were great videos: Musashi returns home after a long restaurant shift and then somehow cooks an entire meal for himself and his girlfriend, Jasmine, who films (and who presumably recognized her partner’s parasocial potential). I noticed Musashi using a dense, black, intriguingly smooth cutting board. I wasn’t alone — the comments were full of people asking where he got it. As he explained in a subsequent video, it’s a block of special, rubbery plastic called ethylene vinyl acetate. The material is softer than a normal plastic cutting board, thus not dulling your knife as quickly, and much more anti-bacterial and mold-resistant than a wood board. You can sanitize it with bleach. It’s made by Kama-Asa, a Japanese kitchenware brand founded in 1908.

Cutting boards are a triggering subject in our age of microplastics, inspiring OCD flashes and germ anxiety. Wood soaks up liquid. Glass is a sensory nightmare to cut on. Everything smells like garlic. Are you even caring for that butcher block correctly? As Musashi did, I noticed our average thin, white plastic cutting board getting marked up and dug into by knife tracks. Where was that carved out plastic going — into our food!? I was intrigued by the Kama-Asa option and I asked my wife for it as a birthday gift (still avoiding pushing the button myself). It took a few weeks to arrive direct from Kama-Asa in Japan, but there are US ecommerce sources as well. (A Kama-Asa storefront is also opening next month in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.) I got a Large size cutting board, about 20 inches by 12 inches. It’s almost an inch thick and weighs more than 6 pounds.

cutting board action shot!!

I never thought I’d appreciate a cutting board so much. As Musashi’s videos demonstrated, the black color is extremely aesthetic. Ingredients, like a recent mise-en-place of green onion, lemon zest, parsley, and bottarga for a pasta, stand out like dashes of paint on a canvas. Functionally, it’s akin to a plastic version of butcherblock, heavy enough to stay put on its own weight; it is bulky, but if you’re doing family-scale cooking I’d go for the Large. Its surface is soft but not pliant. A chef’s knife slices, rocks, and glides on it perfectly. The density of its material feels luxurious and unexpected. It’s easy to sweep ingredients off of and easy to scrub it clean. The surface can still get marked up a bit — you’re chopping on it, after all. But then you bleach or buff the cutting board with one of the sandpaper-ish scrapers that Kama-Asa recommends, which are also available on Amazon. I’d suggest buying them at the same time because you’ll want it sooner or later. (Putting the cutting board in the dishwasher or pouring boiling water on it, however, can cause warping.)

The cutting board might not outdo a nice end-grain butcher block — it is in fact much cheaper than the wooden top of the line — but then it’s not supposed to. It’s a daily workhorse, repelling meat juice and allium odors, that provides an added level of delight with its monolithic visual quality. My highest praise for the Kama-Asa board might be this: When I recently took out the old white plastic board and tried to slice something on it, I flinched. It was loud, stiff, and rough — as grating to my senses as nails on a chalkboard. I immediately swapped it for the Kama-Asa, which felt as gentle as a knife through butter. Except the knife didn’t go through it, obviously. You know what I mean.

Update: I fixed the ecommerce link to the actual Kama-Asa board instead of Asahi, though various versions of this kind of Japanese cutting board exist. If you do buy it online in the US you’ll likely pay more than straight from Kama-Asa.

---

Best of One Thing

Look back through the archives for OT’s greatest hits. We send out short newsletters on taste, authenticity, and recommendation culture every Tuesday and Thursday.

• The perfect precision ladle It’s important to have the right size cooking tools, as we discovered buying this small ladle in Paris.

• This is not a small plates restaurant Diners are getting tired of tiny sharing plates and the cliche natty wine bar.

• Our camera rolls, our selves Phone camera rolls store every moment of our lives. What does this infinity of photography mean?

• Aggregation theory Big media companies and tiny Substacks alike are competing to offer authoritative viewpoints.

• The disappearing Insta grid Why we don’t like posting to Instagram’s main feed anymore.