Review on Acacia Wood End Grain Cheese Board By Ironwood Gourmet - Calistoga Series by Rick Bishop

This is my second one of these - I had one a few years ago that I completely destroyed when I refinished my cast iron pans and the wood became completely impregnated with iron filings. My bad. Got another one and I love it. A nice trade-off between the convenience of a plastic cutting mat and the solidity of an actual cutting board/block- it's small and light and thin so you can easily transport food after cutting.I will say this, however - because it's important to keep in mind. If you're here, you may be looking at this because it's an END GRAIN cutting board, and end grain cutting boards are supposed to be a bit easier on the edge of your good knives than long grain boards, and much easier on them than plastic boards or mats. Problem is that end grain cutting boards generally have to be big and thick, so they're both unwieldy and expensive.Generally speaking, this is all correct. But keep in mind, Acacia is a VERY hard wood - it's almost twice as hard as walnut, cherry or maple. More eco-sensitive, since it's more of a grass and it grows very quickly, but that hardness is undoing a lot of the point of buying a board like this in the first place. So what I would recommend is that if you have a normal Western-style knife - Wusthoff, Sabatier, normal thick, hearty, etc. - they'll be fine with a board like this. But if you happen to have a very thin, very sharp (often very expensive) carbon steel japanese knife, you really need to pair that with something made from Walnut, Maple, Cherry or another non-poisonous (check first on exotics!) relatively soft wood, it it should be at least 1.5in thick.For the vast, vast majority of people, this is going to be perfectly fine. But for the more delicate japanese knives, go for something more traditional.