304 Food-Grade Stainless Steel
Explore Tivano Cutting Board™ features — durable, non-porous, scratch-resistant, double-sided and 100% dishwasher safe. No oiling, no warping, no bacteria hiding in knife grooves.
Think about how a normal week of cooking actually works. You take a board out, you chop an onion on it, you slice chicken on it, you rinse it, you stand it up to dry, and you do the same thing again the next evening. That one flat surface touches nearly everything your household eats. And yet, for most people, it is the cheapest and oldest item in the entire kitchen — a plastic sheet that has gone grey and fuzzy with knife scars, or a wooden slab with a dark seam running through the middle where the glue has started to let go.
The Tivano Cutting Board™ was designed around a simple observation: the professional kitchens that are inspected most rigorously do not build their prep surfaces out of porous materials. They build them out of stainless steel, because steel can be cleaned back to zero every single time. Tivano takes that logic and shrinks it into a board that fits in your sink, your dishwasher and your drawer.
If you have been putting up with a board that smells faintly of garlic three days after you cut one, or a bamboo board that has begun to split along its length, this page will walk you through exactly what changes when you switch — the material, the hygiene, the care routine, the everyday feel of using it, and the honest trade-offs too.
Plastic boards wear out invisibly. A new polyethylene board is smooth and easy to sanitise. After a few months of real use it is covered in thousands of fine cuts, and each of those cuts is a channel that holds moisture and protein. Scrubbing pushes residue further in rather than lifting it out. Worse, every one of those cuts represents a tiny amount of plastic that has left the board — and it has not evaporated. Households that go through a plastic board every year or two are effectively running a slow-motion consumable in the place where their food is prepared.
Wooden and bamboo boards demand maintenance. A good wooden board is a genuinely lovely object, but it is also a commitment. It should never go in the dishwasher. It wants oiling every few weeks with food-grade mineral oil. It stains from turmeric and beetroot. It absorbs the smell of garlic, fish and onion and slowly hands those smells back to whatever you chop next. Bamboo, which is harder and cheaper, is assembled from glued strips, and heat plus water eventually finds the glue line. That split down the middle is not a cosmetic issue; it is an unreachable cavity in the surface you cut food on.
Glass boards protect hygiene and destroy knives. Tempered glass is non-porous, which solves one problem while creating another. Glass is far harder than a knife edge, so every cut microscopically rolls or chips the blade. It is also loud and slippery. People who buy glass boards tend to use them as trivets within a month.
Stainless steel sits in the gap none of those materials cover: non-porous like glass, durable like nothing else, maintenance-free unlike wood, and kind enough to a blade that you can genuinely cook on it every day.
Every detail below exists to solve a specific frustration people have with the board they own right now.
The same grade used for commercial prep benches, mixing bowls and surgical trays. Chromium in the alloy forms a passive corrosion-resistant layer, so acidic food such as lemon, tomato and vinegar has no effect on the surface.
Liquid cannot soak in, because there is nowhere for it to go. Juice from raw chicken sits on top of the steel rather than inside it, which is precisely why it rinses away instead of lingering.
The brushed finish shrugs off the marks that turn a plastic board grey within a season. Turmeric, beetroot, berries and red wine wipe clean, and the board looks the same in year three as it did in week one.
Both faces are finished identically, so you can keep one side strictly for raw meat and fish and the other for salad, fruit, bread and cooked food. Flip instead of fetching a second board.
Load it flat or on edge and forget about it. There is no oiling schedule, no hand-dry ritual and no risk of warping, splitting or delaminating in the heat.
The cut-out lets the board hang on a rail or hook so both faces air-dry fully, and doubles as a grip for carrying prepped ingredients to the pan or the grill.
It slides into the gap beside the oven, behind the sink or into a drawer. A stack of two takes less room than one chunky end-grain block.
Rest a hot pan lid or a roasting dish straight on it. Steel does not scorch, blister or leave a burnt ring the way timber and polymer do.
Edges are radiused and deburred, so there is no sharp lip to catch a knuckle or a tea towel.
There is no wear mechanism to speak of. No glue to fail, no fibres to lift, no plastic to shed. One board, bought once.
The honest test of any cutting board is what happens after you cut raw chicken on it. On a scored plastic board, the juice runs into the grooves and a sponge simply cannot reach the bottom of them. On wood, part of it is absorbed. On steel, all of it stays where you can see it, and hot soapy water removes it in seconds.
That difference matters most for the foods people worry about: poultry, pork, fish, raw egg, and anything being prepared for children, pregnant women, older relatives or someone recovering from illness. It also matters for allergens. A gluten-free or nut-free household cannot fully clean a porous board, but a steel one leaves nothing behind to transfer.
Everyday smells disappear for the same reason. Garlic, chilli, onion, coriander and oily fish do not permeate the material, so the board that sliced salmon at lunch can slice strawberries in the evening without giving anything away.
| Tivano steel | Plastic | Wood / bamboo | Glass | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-porous surface | Yes | No once scored | No | Yes |
| Dishwasher safe | Yes | Usually | No | Yes |
| Needs oiling | Never | Never | Every few weeks | Never |
| Stains & odours | Resists both | Stains easily | Absorbs both | Resists both |
| Kind to knife edges | Good | Good | Best | Poor |
| Warps, splits or cracks | No | Can warp | Common | Can shatter |
| Sheds particles into food | No | Microplastics | Wood fibres | No |
| Typical replacement cycle | Years and years | 1–2 years | 2–5 years | Rarely used |
The table makes the trade-off clear. Wood keeps a slight edge on blade friendliness, and if you own one beautiful hand-forged knife you may want to keep a wooden board for it. For everything else — the daily volume of chopping, the raw protein, the acidic fruit, the garlic, the bread, the cheese — steel wins on every line that affects hygiene, longevity and the amount of effort you have to put in.
The larger Tivano board is the workhorse. It gives you room to push chopped onion to one corner while you break down peppers in the middle, which is the single biggest reason home cooking feels rushed — not knife skill, but running out of space.
The smaller board is the one that lives on the counter. It is ideal for a quick sandwich, a lime for a drink, a block of cheese, or as a dedicated raw-meat board in a busy kitchen. It also travels well to a caravan, a boat galley, a student flat or a holiday rental with a suspicious-looking board in the cupboard.
Households that order both tend to settle into a simple system: big board face A for produce, face B for meat; small board kept for anything that needs to be quick. Once the habit is set, cross-contamination stops being something you have to think about.
Thirty seconds of setup that professional kitchens never skip. A damp tea towel or thin silicone mat under the board locks it to the counter, kills most of the noise and makes fast knife work feel controlled rather than nervous.
Decide that face A is produce and face B is raw protein. Some people scratch a tiny mark near the handle, others simply always keep the handle cut-out facing left for produce. Any rule works as long as it is consistent.
Steel rewards a slicing motion. Draw the blade through the food rather than hammering straight down, and both the cut and the edge will be better for it. This is how a chef uses any board, but on steel the difference is noticeable straight away.
Chop, tilt, and use the cut-out to carry the board to the pan. Because the surface is slick, ingredients slide off cleanly instead of sticking in knife grooves the way they do on a worn plastic board.
Hot water and a drop of detergent takes seconds, or put it straight in the dishwasher. Hang it by the handle so both faces dry fully. No oil, no conditioning, no standing it in the sun.
Steel wool and abrasive powders, which will dull the brushed finish; leaving heavily salted acidic food to sit on it overnight; and using it as a chopping block for bone-in butchery with a cleaver, which is a job for a thick end-grain block in any kitchen.
Families cooking from scratch. High volume, raw meat several times a week, and no patience for a maintenance routine. Tivano handles all of it and goes in the machine with the dinner plates.
Meal preppers. Sunday batch cooking is a production line, and a flat, slick, easy-to-reset surface keeps it moving.
Small kitchens. A slim board that hangs on a hook frees the counter space a thick block eats up.
Anyone avoiding microplastics. If you have already changed your storage containers and chopping habits, the board is the obvious remaining gap.
Campers, caravanners and boaters. It will not mould in a damp locker and it will not crack when the van heats up.
Gift buyers. It arrives in a clean retail box, it photographs beautifully, and unlike most kitchen gifts it does not need explaining.
★★★★★
“I had a drawer of grey, scarred plastic boards and I threw all of them out the week this arrived. It goes in the dishwasher, it comes out spotless, and there is no onion smell in the morning.”
★★★★★
“I always felt uneasy about chicken on a plastic board. One side for meat, one side for veg, straight into the machine afterwards. That is the whole reason I bought it and it does exactly that.”
★★★★★
“I was braced for it to wreck my edges. It has not. I hone a bit more often and that is honestly it. It also makes my kitchen feel like a proper prep station.”
Used the way it is designed to be used, the Tivano Cutting Board is gentler on an edge than most people expect. A knife dulls when the edge rolls or chips against a hard, unyielding point, which is exactly what happens on glass, granite and ceramic. The Tivano surface is a thin, slightly flexible sheet with a brushed finish, so the blade glides rather than jars. Most home cooks find that they hone a little more often and sharpen no more than they did with bamboo. If you are protective of a very expensive Japanese carbon blade, keep that knife for a wooden board and use Tivano for the everyday prep, raw meat, garlic, onions, citrus and cheese, where hygiene matters most.
Yes, and the reason is simple physics rather than marketing. Bacteria need somewhere to live. Wood and plastic both develop knife scoring, and those grooves trap moisture, protein and juice below the reach of a sponge. Food-grade 304 stainless steel is non-porous and does not absorb liquid at all, so residue stays on the surface where soap and hot water can remove it. It is the same reason professional kitchens are fitted out in steel benches rather than timber ones.
It is 100% dishwasher safe. There is no oil to reapply, no warping, no splitting and no cracking along a glue line, because the board is a single piece of steel rather than laminated strips. Load it in the machine as you would a baking tray and it will come out clean and dry. If you are washing by hand, warm soapy water and thirty seconds is usually enough.
The board is heavier and flatter than it looks in photographs, which keeps it stable for normal chopping. For heavy work such as breaking down a chicken, do what chefs do with any board: lay a damp tea towel or a thin silicone mat underneath. It grips instantly and the board will not travel.
304 stainless steel contains chromium, which forms an invisible passive layer that resists corrosion. Tomato, lemon, turmeric, beetroot and red wine wipe straight off without staining, which is one of the most obvious differences from plastic. Avoid leaving salted, acidic food sitting on it overnight and avoid steel wool, and the finish will stay as it came.
Yes, and you should. The board is double-sided by design so you can dedicate one face to raw protein and the other to produce, bread and ready-to-eat food. That single habit is one of the most effective cross-contamination controls available to a home kitchen, and it costs nothing.
Plenty of people buy it for cutting and then keep finding new jobs for it. It works as a serving platter for charcuterie and cheese, a landing pad for a hot pan, a rolling surface for pastry that stays cool, a chilled plate if you put it in the freezer for ten minutes, and a tray for carrying prepped ingredients to the grill.
It makes a different sound from wood, closer to the clean tap you hear in a restaurant kitchen. On a solid counter the noise is modest, and a thin mat underneath deadens it almost entirely while also stopping any movement.
The larger board is the sensible default if you cook for a family, because prep space is the thing people run out of first. The smaller one suits a compact kitchen, a caravan, an office kitchenette or a second board kept purely for raw meat. Many households order a pair and label a side of each.
Every order button on this page goes to the official Tivano store, where current pricing, size options, bundle offers and shipping details are shown at checkout. Ordering through the official store is also the only way to be covered by the brand's own returns and support.
Most kitchen upgrades are small pleasures. This one is different, because it removes a recurring chore and a recurring worry at the same time. You stop replacing boards. You stop oiling them. You stop wondering whether the grooves are really clean. You stop throwing out a scarred plastic rectangle every eighteen months and buying another one exactly like it.
What you get instead is a single flat sheet of food-grade 304 stainless steel that cleans back to new every time, works on both faces, survives the dishwasher indefinitely and looks like it belongs in a professional kitchen. It is the least glamorous and most used surface in the house, finally made properly.
Pricing, available sizes, current bundle offers and delivery details are all shown on the official Tivano store. Every order button on this page takes you there.