You recently bought a beautiful cutting board and you love the look and feel of it. And, of course, nothing beats the feeling of satisfaction you get from having a reliable, quality hardwood cutting board beneath your knife! Right?
What about that painful warp making it completely useless and dangerous to use as it flip-flops left and right while you try to tame its wild restless motions just to cut an onion. We’ve got a little secret to help you avoid and repair that annoying twist you found in your valued cutting board.
The nice thing about wooden cutting boards is that they’re not actually useless after they have been put through conditions that make them warp. This is because with a bit of patience, you can get it straight as an arrow again — without tools or considerable effort. How is that? You flip it over and let it smooth back to normal. That’s it.
As Brad, from Earlywood, points out, cupping—which is the technical word for warping—“happens when you leave a cutting board flat on a countertop and the top dries more than the bottom.”
When wood is wet, it expands. When its dries, it contracts. The trick to preventing warping is to never let your cutting board dry out on one side faster than the other. And the trick to reverse warping is as simple as flipping it over. The board’s curve will flatten out quite naturally without any pressure needed.
Now you know how to fix a warp in your cutting board. It’s simple, yet it can be time consuming. That’s because it can take up to several weeks for a board to come back to normal after it has been flipped over. It takes time for it to warp, so it’s only normal that it takes a comparable amount of time to bring it back.
You’re not going to want to have to wait so long every time there is a warp in your board, right? That is why treating your hardwood cutting board with a mineral oil and beeswax conditioner on a regular basis is strongly recommended. This treatment will help reduce warping because it helps keep moisture outside of the wood—moisture that causes warping when it dries out unevenly. To learn more about this treatment and other information follow this link to our Bulk Cutting Boards Care and Maintenance page.
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