Kitchens with built-in, pull-out cutting boards are great. You can position the garbage can (or compost bin, if you live in Portland) beneath and sweep your onion skins or potato peels right in there. Otherwise, the board becomes cluttered and you end up mixing the ends of the garlic in with the good bits, and it’s just a mess.
But even those of us who can sweep debris right into the waste basket still have to deal with a cramped cutting board when we’re chopping more than a single type of vegetable. To solve the problem, ThinkHat wants to add some extensions in the form of little containers.
Very similar to a recently wrapped Kickstarter, the Frankfurter Brett, ThinkHat’s ChopTainer is yet another crowdfunded kitchen gadget. Both the $198 Frankfurter and the ChopTainer are meant to expand your cutting board space with special containers into which you can sweep your chopped veggies and meat. But they each have different aesthetics and price-points.
While the bamboo-and-steel Frankfurter comes with a board and built-in racks for gastronorm containers (a universal, clear plastic bin used by catering companies), the green and gray plastic ChopTainers are meant to work with whatever cutting board you already use — they basically are the bins themselves. There are two types of ChopTainers: regular, and colander (for washing whatever you’ve just scooped into it).
They’re shaped sort of like a dustpan, with a flat side that you align flush with the board and the remainder curving over to form a bowl. There are measurement markings, so you can tell if you’ve just chopped a cup of onions (if you can see through your tears). And thanks to its relative flatness, the ChopTainer seems likely to work with many cutting boards, except those flexible placemat-style ones.
The ChopTainer is available for preorder now on Kickstarter. You can pick up a set of three (two regular and one colander) for $20, and they should arrive in February 2016, if all goes according to plan.
