The Cutting Board Mistake That Makes Knives Dull

Equipping yourself with a set of good sharp knives is essential for making your chopping, slicing, and dicing processes smooth and enjoyable. Dull knives, on the other hand, are a drag to work with. You'll be hacking and sawing away at ingredients for a long time before they're ready for cooking. Moreover, when using a dull knife, it's harder to produce a presentable meal with clean lines and neat pieces; you can say goodbye to beautifully portioned fruits and uniformly chopped veggies in your salad or neatly sliced beef steaks for dinner. 

But more to that, blunt knives are a health hazard. Unlike a sharp cutter that moves effortlessly in whichever direction you take it when slicing through ingredients, a blunt knife forces you to apply extra pressure hence the knife can easily skid and injure you.

So how do you prevent your knives from going blunt too fast? You'll be surprised that one seemingly harmless act of clearing or scraping your ingredients off the chopping board is costing you your knife's sharpness. This cutting board mistake will make your knives dull faster.

Let's be honest, we've all done this at one point or another: After chopping up a selection of herbs and spices, without thinking, you pick up the cutting board and use your knife to scrape the pile of ingredients into your cooking pot. This is the mistake that's been dulling your knife blades quicker than usual.

The rubbing motion of the knife across a hard surface like a chopping board destroys the otherwise sharp edge by interfering with the steel's alignment. Do it often enough, and you'll notice your knife become less efficient for your pro-cutting techniques.

To spare your knife's cutting edge, simply flip the blade and use the blunt side instead to push those chopped onions. Even better, go for a bench scraper to do the scraping. This flat metal rectangular kitchen item is well known among bakers but is also designed to scoop up things, including your heap of ingredients from the chopping board. In fact, even celebrity chef Michael Symon affirmed its usefulness when he described it, on Twitter, as "the greatest and cheapest kitchen tool."