How to clean a wooden cutting board – clean and refresh a tired board with 4 kitchen cupboard essentials
Is your wooden cutting board looking a little dull? Bring it back to its former glory with these common household items
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As beautiful and rustic as they look, cleaning wooden cutting boards is anything but straightforward. Favoured for their natural origin and look, they are problematic to deal with due to their grain, which is why they are never used in commercial kitchens. But it turns out that how to clean a wooden cutting board is fairly simple and requires items from your kitchen cupboard.
And they’re all natural on top of that. We love a natural cleaning hack around here after all. If you think about it, it only makes sense that a natural material like wood should be cared for with natural ingredients.
So these are the four au naturel items to not only clean but also refresh your best chopping board with and bring it to its former glory, according to cleaning experts.
How to clean and refresh a wooden cutting board
The amount of lemon cleaning hacks is endless. Teaming up with coarse salt and cleaning a wooden cutting board is one of its powers. Indeed, there are very few things that this little citrus fruit can’t do.
Polya Petrova, kitchen cleaning expert at Fantastic Cleaners, continues, ‘Cleaning wooden cutting boards with lemon and salt once a month should be enough to help maintain them. This method can help remove stains on the board. It also helps freshen up the cutting board if it smells strongly of aromatic spices.’
What you’ll need
- Coarse salt
- Lemon
- White vinegar
- Food grade mineral oil like this one from Amazon
Step-by-step refresh guide
Start by rinsing your wooden chopping board with warm water. Do not soak the board, as this can cause the wood to crack if it absorbs too much water and dries out.
Then it’s time for the salt and lemon cleaning hack. ‘Sprinkle the board with coarse salt, like sea salt or kosher salt. Take a lemon cut in half, and rub the lemon cut side down over the salt on the board, scrubbing in small circles, following the direction of the grain,’ Polya explains.
Let the natural cleaning solution sit on the board for 5-15 minutes to disinfect and remove stains from the surface.
Let the board dry completely before applying the food grade mineral oil, which will get rid of any dryness and dullness and bring shine back to the wood.
‘Once the board is dry, an application of food grade oil can be applied with a soft cloth and left overnight to soak in – any excess should be buffed from the surface the next day with a dry soft cloth,’ says Denise Hanson, commercial director at the British Institute of Cleaning Science (BICSc).
This process should be done at least once a month.
Does vinegar clean wooden cutting board?
Due to its antibacterial properties, white vinegar can also be used to disinfect a wooden cutting board.
How do you clean raw meat off a wooden cutting board?
‘Coarse sea salt can be used as an abrasive with half a lemon to scrub the surface after preparing fruit and vegetables,’ Denise says. ‘However, if the board is used to chop or prepare raw meat then I would recommend a more commercial product.’
And just like that you will have a wooden cutting board that’s clean and shiny as new.
