America's Test Kitchen is wrong. End grain is way better. They wear better as you aren't cross cutting the fibers of the wood. Sure they absorb more oil... So? I have both end grain and edge grain cutting boards.
> America's Test Kitchen is wrong. End grain is way better.
ATK is basically a commercial kitchen that does a lot of volume with dozens of chefs/cooks. They've been recommending edge grain for at least a decade:
I'm going to lean towards trusting their review process—that probably wails on these boards more than I ever will—more than anecdata.
> They wear better as you aren't cross cutting the fibers of the wood.
They did wear-testing with the help of Autodesk and a robotic arm (see 3m14s) that went at the boards thousands of times. This is in addition to the daily use they probably get at ATK.
If there is a wearing difference is, I doubt I'll hit volumes high enough for it to matter as a home cook.
LOL: my (late) uncle was a meat cutter and owned a butcher shop for many years: most of his surfaces were metal and plastic for easier cleaning.
> They cut a lot more cutting than any chef... and they are end grain
What butcher does and what a chef does are different things. Chefs do slicing, chiffonade, julienning, dicing, and chopping (vertical movements). Butchers do a lot quartering, deboning, chopping, and filleting (many more horizontal).
Further, if you look at a actual butcher blocks, you'll see that they were not tiny little cutting boards, but actual table/furniture. And the practical reason why they were what we now call 'end grain' is because they were a bunch of long pieces of lumber put together with some feet attached:
The tiny (3" in height) little things that are called "butcher block" nowadays are in the style of the giant tables of yore, but the fact they just happen to have a check board pattern is a aesthetic affectation to mimic that 'real' items of the past. Which is why splitting is probably a much more common occurrence as they're much less surface area for glue between the pieces, so 'moisture shifting' is more likely—which is why maintenance is much more important and needs to be done more often.
But feel free to get whatever: if you want to use up more oil in the regular maintenance of your cutting board (and having to do maintenance more often), I'm not going to stop you.
The point is that the edge grain cutting board absorbs less liquid, period. You'd like your board to not absorb blood from meat too much while you are cutting it.
As for strength and hardness, for the vast majority of people the difference will be negligible thanks to modern glues. Maybe you'll notice that your knives won't dull as fast with edge grain over end grain.
About the only people it would really matter for are if you need an actual butcher block which is going to be used for chopping continuously for 8 hours every day (do they even use them in commercial facilities still?). However, a genuine butcher block is a very different beast. If you find one it looks like it is made up of a hardwood (like maple) in 1x4ish lumber about 6 to 12 inches long. The rows are dovetailed in one direction and generally held together by a threaded rod in the other since hide glues sucked.
In my experience, modern edge gain boards are a marketing optimization to hide crappy wood. You can use smaller wood chunks and use a lot more glue.
