Review of MIU Flexible Plastic Cutting Boards: Allergy Friendly
Reader Opinion of MIU Plastic Cutting Boards
Generally I prefer wood cutting boards over plastic, because I believe they're more sanitary. But they do take a lot of maintenance and require some significant storage space, so for much of my slicing and dicing, I use the MIU color-coded flexible cutting boards, which are made of plastic. These have several advantages for me:
- I have a child with multiple food allergies, and our house is not kept free of the foods the child is allergic to. A handy set of quick, small, easy-to-use, easy-to-clean cutting boards makes it easy for me to prevent cross-contact and contamination with the allergenic foods.
- I cut a LOT of food over the course of a day. I'm also terrible about washing the cutting boards right after use. I even (don't tell anyone!) throw my wooden cutting boards in the dishwasher because I hate washing them so much. This means that I'm always in need of a cutting board. Until I got these flexible plastic sheets by MIU, I was always scrounging for cutting boards and having to dig them out of the pile of dishes. Now I never have to be without a clean surface to cut on.
- I love small cutting boards, because I'm always slicing food for one person at a time, since at any one meal I'm cooking for at least three different sets of dietary restrictions. (Our family could be the poster family for food allergies.) The set I've linked to above includes 4 small cutting boards (8 1/2" x 11", about the size of a piece of typewriter paper), plus 4 standard sized 11" X 15" boards. The small ones are, if anything, more useful than the large ones.
- They're easy to care for and wash. I wash them in the bottom rack of the dishwasher and they come out fine. They can be bent around other dishes without developing a permanent curve (so far at least). The fact that they don't take up a big portion of dishwasher space is only a good thing.
- They don't take up a lot of storage room. I stack them all together vertically in one slot of a vertical kitchen storage organizer my sister-in-law bought (it's similar to
this one.)
- They're color coded, so if I can get organized enough, I can dedicate one to food allergy A, food allergy B, and so on.
- The small ones are marked with graphs, circles and measurement conversions. I still haven't figured out what the graphs and circles are for, but the conversions are very handy.
- Food transport is easy. If the product description hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known this feature was so handy, but now that I do, I'm sold. It's very easy to carry the food you just cut and slip it into the pot. You just pick up the flexible board on either side and let the middle sag, and then "spill" it all into your cooking vessel along the curve. This saves my back and extra dishes.
- They're cute and cheerful colored.
So anyway, these kitchen tools are simple but very useful and convenient and have really helped me manage my myriad cooking projects. They make accommodating the assorted food allergies in my family much less stressful.
In writing this review, I tried to think of some cons (even my beloved All-Clad cookware has cons), but really the only disadvantage is one of principle: in an ideal world, I prefer wooden cutting boards, which are much easier on cutting edges than hard plastic cutting boards. But my life is not one of principle, but of practical reality, and the MIU series is an eminently practical set of flexible cutting boards.
Cutting Board Organizers
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