Any person who has spent a decent amount of time in their kitchen is familiar with cutting boards and electric food choppers. They each embody opposing approaches to food preparation. One prioritizes mastery and experience, while the other is about speed and efficiency. In this post, we will be taking a closer look at both utensils and will answer the question: Should you buy a cutting board or an electric food chopper?
A Brief Introduction to Electric Food Choppers and Cutting Boards
Electric food choppers do exactly what the name implies: help you chop up food using electricity. It can help you mince, chop, and dice nuts, herbs, veggies, cooked meats, and other hard-to-chop ingredients when making meals that benefit from a bit of texture.
Cutting boards are large flat blocks of wood, plastic, or bamboo that let you cut, mash, dice, clean, and mince up ingredients while preparing for your meal. It provides a solid base for prepping meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, and all manner of ingredients.
So which is better: The Electric Chopper or the Cutting Board?
It's clear that the food chopper is the superior kitchen utensil/appliance at an initial glance. Aside from the obvious difference in speed, there are some other unique advantages to using one instead of a cutting board.
Advantages of Owning an Electric Food Chopper
- Easy to operate
- Very energy efficient
- Provides consistent texture when it cuts, minces, or chops
- Can cut hard-to-process ingredients like nuts
- Great for when you are cooking for multiple people
- You can clean it with a dishwasher
With all that said, it can be pretty easy to count out the cutting board. After all, if the name is any indication, the electric food chopper is just a faster version of it. However, don't dismiss the cutting board just yet. Though the name says 'cutting,' you can use it for a whole lot more.
Advantages of Owning a Cutting Board
- Lets you actively improve your dexterity with the knife
- Easier to clean - just wipe it off and rinse
- Better suited for when you are cooking for a small group
- Lets you cut ingredients in whatever sizes you prefer (meat, fish)
- You can use it for baking, tenderizing, mashing, and cleaning ingredients
- It is considerably cheaper than the electric food chopper
Limitations of Having an Electric Food Chopper or Cutting Board
The electric Food chopper and cutting board are great at many things, but they are not perfect by any means.
Electric food choppers can't handle delicate or deliberate cutting and cannot help you cut fish or meat in most cases, and are ill-suited for crushing or mashing ingredients. They are also reliant on electric power and will not work if they develop any kind of malfunction.
Cutting boards, on the other hand, can do all of these things but are significantly slower. You will need something faster, especially if you eat a lot of vegetables or are cooking for more than one or two people.
Choose Both the Electric Chopper and Cutting Board
It should be clear by now that both products, while similar in their uses, were not designed to be compared with one another. Cutting boards are versatile, while electric food choppers are designed with a single function in mind for the most part.
In reality, they complement one another, and each has its uses in the kitchen. Instead of choosing between either, we vote you own both. Use the cutting board while you prepare food for yourself, and use the electric food chopper when you need to cut lots of vegetables.
However, if we were talking hypotheticals, and you could only have one in your kitchen, we say choose the cutting board. It is more versatile and can do everything the electric food chopper can.
