23 Best Gifts for Cooks (2026): Panasonic, Frying Pans, Air Fryers Leave a comment

Each prepare dinner has seen these checkerboard-looking reducing boards and thirsted for them slightly. They’re good-looking, in fact, however they’re additionally practical. Utilizing the smaller end-grain wooden items makes your butcher block more durable to nick (which issues not only for aesthetics however micro organism), and simpler in your favourite knife. However as a result of an end-grain board have to be made out of many items of wooden, they’re normally fairly costly. And so they’re good items for the prepare dinner in your life—a practical indulgence they might not have afforded themselves, however which they are going to be grateful for every day they use it.

A Boardsmith walnut end-grain is the board I’ve been utilizing and treasuring for the previous 12 months. Walnut wooden, like most maple and fruit woods, falls within the candy spot of hardness that is laborious to ding up however simple on knives. It is bought that good darkish, uh, walnut coloration. Its heft makes it unlikely to maneuver round. And it makes me really feel slightly higher every time I prepare dinner—as if reducing celery have been a type of luxurious I would beforehand been denied. The prepare dinner in your life will seemingly really feel a lot the identical. Observe that maple can be a terrific cutting-board wooden, and Boardsmith’s prices $50 lower than walnut. —Matthew Korfhage

Different nice reducing boards: If you do not have room for a giant ol’ butcher-block board, Steelport has a sublime resolution. The Steelport SteelCore ($280) is a uncommon factor: a genuinely progressive reducing board. It is a still-hefty however a lot thinner board made with end-grain walnut on one facet for veggies and on a regular basis prep, a composite reducing board on the flip facet for uncooked meat, and metal beams inside for each heft and warp resistance—all in a slim sufficient bundle it is easy to stash. I’ve presumably by no means met a extra helpful board, and it is nonetheless a little bit of a looker.

On the funds facet, this reversible edge-grain block from Boos can be nice (if not as nice as end-cut boards), and it is solely $87.