Fem's Handcrafted Hardwood Boards

Fem's Handcrafted Hardwood Boards

Presentation is fundamental to your enjoyment of food.

Actually, presentation is fundamental to an appreciation of most fine things in life.No matter how utterly utilitarian an item is, the more beautiful it is, the more it pleases.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the more functional something is, the more I desire that that item is also lovely.

Fortunately, I have a husband who is a hobbyist woodworker and makes laminated hardwood breadboards on occasion.

How easy and utterly functional is is to throw fresh bread, or cheese, or pizzas still oozing hot cheese straight from the oven onto a beautiful hardwood board and present it as is, as I did recently for a book club gathering:

Pizza hot from the oven served on a hardwood board

My husband loves woodworking; as a result, he has a penchant for collecting wood - hoarding it I say. Where others see rubbish, he sees hidden treasure. I'm convinced it was the main reason he was insistent on having at least an acre of ground around his house - that way he figured he could distribute his hoardings - sorry, collection - over a larger area without the neighbours necessarily complaining. Just as well he has a remarkably forebearing wife.

Just the other day, off he went in his bakkie (truck) to the nearby dump, loaded up with kids in the front and masses of alien vegetation in the back and spilling out the trailer but for the ropes that tied them in (the vegetation, not the kids). Upon his return, the kids tumbled out, the trailer was unhitched and he shortly thereafter disappeared. The truck was nowhere to be seen and the chain-saw had been unearthed from somewhere and disappeared along with him. Some three hours later, he snuck back into the yard, going slowly since the back of the bakkie was burdened down by extremely large chunks of camphor (which has become a highly invasive alien in our neck of the woods). These he had found deposited on the dump so he proceeded to chop them into smaller pieces and then manhandle these pieces, puffing and panting, onto and then off of truck. When I asked him to negotiate the pieces into an area which was slightly less in the line of sight, he claimed in true nautical fashion, to be utterly pooped, which term it seems refers to a wave coming over the stern from abaft, possibly capsizing the ship. That is, he was well and truly knackered, exhausted, utterly spent, and he spent the rest of the afternoon recuperating in bed.

The wood was left then in full view of all guests until such time as he had help placing them in a well-hidden spot under the hibiscus tree. We are losing a lot to termites, but his hopes remain high that in oh, about a decade or so, he'll be able to work with the rest. Given that large chunks of wood dry out naturally at the rate of about an inch a year, this is not an exaggeration. He keeps trying to persuade me that he need accumulate more, for later use. I remain unpersuaded in this regard.

In the interim, what with wood piled up in the garage, in the outbuilding, all around the yard, I finally cried: Enough already! So he began making boards, which he normally makes out of scrap but since so many of our friends and relatives have commissioned them from him over the years, it seemed as good a way of dealing with excess wood as any. And I, of course, began documenting the process. 

Construction Process:

* Each plank is planed of its rough edges

* Planks are then sawn into smaller strips

A row of planed, sawed strips of hardwood ready for assembling

* The strips are glued with waterproof glue

* The laminated strips are clamped

The strips are glued together and then clamped

* The laminated plank once dry, is then planed again & again

* It is then cut to size:

Cutting the board to size takes concentration

A stack of boards cut to size but still to be planed and shaped

* Edges are shaped with a router

My husband will often make special indents in the edges too, each one is then unique

* The end product is sanded

* It is then oiled with walnut oil (which is non-toxic, organic and hardens) or an equivalent made for us by Natal Associated Chemicals.

For his boards, only hardwoods are used since they are hardy and long-lasting, but more importantly, they are beautiful. Hardwoods are deciduous trees, typically from the rainforest regions of the world. Their wood is prized the world over because of its beauty, resilience and durability. The hardwoods used are:

Paduak (African Rosewood), 

African Teak 

African Mahogany 

American Maple.

In the beginning, he used American Red Oak, but it is unfortunately prone to reacting with iron in the water, which stains it black. Which is fine if you want the board blackened, but if you don't, since you cannot varnish chopping or cutting boards, we no longer use Red Oak in construction:

The black stains are caused by iron in water reacting with the tannins in the Red Oak

Each board is a labour of love, since my dear husband figures that, well, if he is going to do something he will do it perfectly, he creates things of beauty that are really not worth anyone's while from a commercial point of view. Given that up to half the wood is shaved off every time he saws it into strips, the fact that he uses multiple thin strips to create contrast and interest indicate his keen appreciation of the end product. Most of the similar pieces we have seen made by craftsmen in the US, for instance, only produce boards with large, chunky strips, since the more aesthetically pleasing boards are far more expensive to manufacture, both in terms of time and in terms of wood.

But how hygenic are wooden boards?

Scientific work undertaken by Dean Cliver and Nese Ak at the University of Wisconsin's Food Research Institute, which was reported in the NY Times in 1993 and which compared plastic boards to wooden ones in fact found that wood has distinct advantages in relation to bacteria in comparison to plastic, particularly when both are in a battle-scarred condition.

From the 1993 NY Times article:

"The scientists, Dean O. Cliver and Nese O. Ak, stumbled upon the finding while seeking ways to decontaminate wooden boards and make them as "safe" as plastic. Much to their surprise, they found that when boards were purposely contaminated with organisms like Salmonella, Listeria and Escherichia coli that are common causes of food poisoning, 99.9 percent of the bacteria died off within three minutes on the wooden boards, while none died on the plastic ones."

"When contaminated boards were left unwashed overnight at room temperature, bacterial counts increased on the plastic, but none of the organisms could be recovered from the wooden boards the next morning."

In a follow up on the issue, Dr Dean Cliver writes: 

"We soon found that disease bacteria such as these were not recoverable from wooden surfaces in a short time after they were applied, unless very large numbers were used. New plastic surfaces allowed the bacteria to persist, but were easily cleaned and disinfected. However, wooden boards that had been used and had many knife cuts acted almost the same as new wood, whereas plastic surfaces that were knife-scarred were impossible to clean and disinfect manually, especially when food residues such as chicken fat were present".  


He concludes: "We know of no similar research that has been done anywhere, so we regard it as the best epidemiological evidence available to date that wooden cutting boards are not a hazard to human health, but plastic cutting boards may be".

As +William Carter noted in a post on this, "I wonder if it is the microstructure of the wood (causing distortion of the bacteria ) or the tannin in the wood (changing local chemistry) or the porosity (dehydrating) or simply the hydrophilicity encouraging faster drying. ... - in any case great empirical result!"

Regardless, I love my boards and I especially love using them.

Faran's cake with cholate ganache and marzipan models on a hardwood board