TO GROOVE OR NOT TO GROOVE: THAT IS THE QUESTION!
Among builders the debate on whether to add juice grooves or not is endless. Many makers do not like adding them as they feel it detracts from the board’s appearance. In a group I am in I read through an entire very long debate on the issue today and through it all the issue of whether a cutting board actually needs a juice groove or not was never really addressed. The majority of comments focused on the look of the board rather than the function of the board and in my opinion it’s the function of the board that is the real determining factor.
Aesthetics aside, whether a cutting board should have a juice groove or not is based on what you are planning to use the board for. This topic actually overlaps with whether you should put feet on a board or not, but we will discuss that in another post.
To begin let’s just touch on what the juice groove is even there for. The purpose of the juice groove is to keep the juices from meats from flowing off of your board onto the counter. Unfortunately with cheap commercial boards the juice groove is barely an indent in the board that does nothing to fulfill its purpose so it doesn’t really matter if it’s there or not as it’s not going to accomplish anything anyway. With a higher quality handcrafted custom board however, the juice grooves are often much deeper allowing meat juices to flow into the groove without ending up on your countertop. If you were to take the groove out of the board completely then those juices will flow onto the countertop and possibly the floor making a huge mess. Therefore my belief is that any cutting board should be fully functional for its intended purpose. If you are going to cut meat on it then it needs a juice groove. In my opinion that’s not even debatable.
However…
With that said, when you cut veggies on a cutting board the juice groove serves no real purpose and actually makes things a bit more difficult. As you scrape the vegetable cuttings off the board the veggies go into the juice groove instead of going into whatever container you are scraping them into. It’s not a huge issue but it is an issue nonetheless. Therefore if your primary purpose for the cutting board is to cut veggies than you probably would not need nor want a juice groove as the flatter surface is better for scraping veggies off the board and into a container.
So…should you groove or not groove? The answer is dependent upon the reason for buying the board. Meat? Then yes. Veggies, then no.
There are two alternatives. The first and probably the best alternative is to have 2 boards. One for each purpose. I prefer that to the second alternative but we will talk about why on another post.
The second alternative is to buy the board with no feet added and in that way you have a two sided board. The top is for meat and the bottom is for veggies. I don’t like this option personally but I’ll build it however you want it.
