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Have you ever walk into a kitchen department store and notice all the beautiful kitchenware with their different designs, materials and colours? One thing I noticed every time I walk into a kitchen department store is that aside from the brand and the category, the products are usually arranged according to their colours or material made.
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Now everyone especially the ladies have a variety of coloured kitchen product choices to choose from to decorate and create a customised "theme" for their kitchen so that we can also enjoy ourselves in there just like any other rooms such as the living room, the dining room or even the bedroom(who doesn't likes being in the bedroom??)
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There are a few products though that will have a repetitive of colours to choose from and one of them is the chopping board. If one would to look closely, the coloured chopping board options tend to be either in red, yellow, green, blue, white or sometimes, we might see a brown coloured chopping board(no, not the wooden ones) around.
(there will be a variation of blues or greens or reds around but they tend to be of the same colour family)
Of course, chopping boards nowadays come in many forms and designs, but do you know besides adding some colour and aesthetic feel to a kitchen, there is a specific reason why certain chopping boards are given a certain colour?
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In most eatery, coloured chopping boards are usually used for a specific item and therefore, I would like to share with you guys about the general understanding of a few different but common coloured chopping boards that we might encounter and what are the items they are usually used for.
YELLOW CHOPPING BOARD
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Yellow is usually associated with brightness, positivism, happiness etc. thus it is quite common to see a few yellow chopping boards lying around in the kitchen somewhere. But a general understanding is that a yellow chopping board is actually design for poultry products like chicken, ducks or a family of birds under a category called Galliformes (You can choose to ignore the latter part because I just want to sound very macam yes tapi bukan [meaning a wannabe] ,lol).
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BLUE CHOPPING BOARD
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A question, when we picture the colour of a sea or river, what would be the first colour that comes to mind most of the time? I dare say at least 8/10 would think of blue.
Therefore, as most us could have guessed, a blue chopping board is mainly for the handling of raw seafood items. Anything that is related to the water, we use the blue chopping board to handle them. Yes, it is pretty direct.
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RED CHOPPING BOARD
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No, red chopping boards are not specially designed for only red coloured fruits/vegetables like tomatoes or apples or red cabbages (though technically speaking it is not wrong to use it for these items). They are actually used for raw red meat items.
Red meat items include meat products from beef, lamb, goat etc. The reason why red coloured chopping boards are usually designed for red meat items is because the meat of these meat are well, red before cooked.
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GREEN CHOPPING BOARD
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A green chopping board is usually designed to handle vegetables and yes, it includes red cabbages and red tomatoes.
Although some people will also use it to handle fruits besides vegetables, but it is generally understood that a green chopping board is mainly used for vegetables.
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BROWN CHOPPING BOARD
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A brown chopping board is usually designed to handle vegetables. Wait, did I just repeated myself? Yes, a brown chopping board although not common even among eateries, is designed to cater to vegetables, but a different type of vegetables(surprise).
Imagine trying to peel the skins of carrots on top of a chopping board, one can expect there might be dirt falling out of the skins onto the chopping board and if we start chopping up other green vegetables on the same chopping board without first washing it, the dirt from the skins of the carrots might get transmitted to the greens. Thus, the main usage of a brown chopping board is actually to cater to root vegetables so that there will be minimal cross-contamination between the different types of vegetables.
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WHITE CHOPPING BOARD
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The most common and most used coloured chopping board, the white chopping board. When I was a young child I only knew of two kinds of chopping board, one is the brown wooden chopping board and one is the white made-of-plastic chopping board. I only came to realised about the other coloured chopping boards as I grew older.
While in most households, the white chopping board is used for almost anything and everything, in most eatery, the white chopping board is actually to handle only two items-dairy products or ready-to-eat/cooked food products.(ready-to-eat items include fruits and nuts)
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The main reason why there are colour coded chopping boards for different food products is to avoid cross-contamination between the products. Nevertheless, there is no right or wrong when it comes to these things and in my personal opinion, as long as there is proper hygiene during the handling of all tools and food products, I do not think there is a need to buy every single coloured chopping boards out there, unless of course, you just like them and want to collect 'em all!
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
