As a present, I received a beautiful engraved wooden cutting board. Problem is, it is raw wood. I’m not going to cut on it, but it would be perfect for piling ribs or steaks or a brisket on for presentation. I think if I use food-grade mineral oil on it that the juices will still seep in and stain it, so how can I seal it in a way that will let me put juicy food on it?
Keep oiling it until the oil won’t soak in anymore. You can also use conditioner like this. It has wax to help repel liquids.
I was a woodworker and made lots of cutting boards.
My go-to was a homemade blend of food-grade mineral oil and beeswax. Worked great.
Commercially available …
Depending on use, it just has to be reapplied somewhat regularly, as the finish starts ‘shedding’ less liquid.
That’s probably the best search phrase for the appropriate product: “butcher block conditioner”.
Mineral oil.
Mineral oil is not recommended so much anymore. It is a petroleum distillate with inconsistent constituents in the final product. Natural plant oils are preferred. Walnut oil is used often and available as a wood finish or just use the stuff you’ll find in the grocery store. Apply multiple coats until the wood won’t absorb any more oil.
This is a subject that can get you more answers than the number of woodworkers you ask.
Mineral oil just means an oil someone derived from something got out of the ground. As opposed to extracting from something recently alive. Food safe is more about how well refined the oil is, and thus how little of the other nastier hydrocarbons are left. In principle you want something like pure paraffin oil. Purity goes up to and beyond pharmaceutical grade.
As to natural oils, Tung oil and Linseed oil are the generally used ones. Food oils are not great as they tend to oxidise to a rancid state.
Then consider waxes, either beeswax or Canuba, for natural ones and paraffin for not. Any may be used in a solution of oil, either mineral or not, as well. In solution they penetrate well.
Mineral oils tend to just soak in. Pick a food safe one, and the rest is easy. Wood oils, Linseed, Tung, or a mix, oxidise slowly and essentially polymerise to form a resilient layer. All require maintenance and people worry about how hygienic the surface is. And that is likely to be an overarching question.
If you use the board with meat, you want to be able to get it properly clean. Whatever treatment you use needs to render the surface impervious to meat and its associated organic residues. And it needs to be maintained in this form. So a penetrating oil might be a good answer. Butchers use their blocks daily, and maintain them on a daily basis. A wooden cutting board in domestic service is not the same use case. But will demand the same upkeep.
Linseed oil is toxic.
I would also recommend the Butcher Block Preservative, which is probably not hard to find, either.
Thank you! I’ve been looking for something like this for my wood cutting boards, and you saved me the trouble.
Well it is toxic in about the same way nearly anything else in the world is eventually toxic. There is nothing intrinsic to Linseed oil that is toxic, and there are food grade versions of it. Indeed the base seed - flax seed - is a common ingredient in some foods, especially breads, and generally finds favour as a healthy ingredient in one’s diet. My local bakery includes soy and linseed as one of its wholemeal breads.
Linseed oil as bought from your local hardware is not likely to be food grade, although if pure will generally be fine. Ensuring it is pure is another matter.
Where things get evil is if the Linseed oil contains drying agents. These are a bit poorly named. They are agents that promote the oxidisation and polymerisation of the oil. A common one is terebene, but others used include various metal oxides, including lead and lead oxide. Lead is clearly a bad start, but has long since vanished from use. But any drying agent is probably a suspect inclusion for food use.
It is the inclusion of drying agents into Linseed oil intended for wood finishing that is going to attract a toxic label. It isn’t the Linseed oil itself. There are many proprietary wood finishing oils, many that are mostly Linseed oil but with inclusion of a few other additives, usually a drying agent, sometimes some other agents to help penetration (solvents) or surface finish (waxes etc). Some will add a bit of polyurethane to generally harden things up. All great for surface finishing, but for a lot of reasons, not what you want on a cutting board.
Flaxseed oil is designed for human consumption. Linseed oil has been boiled, which denatures it (polymerizes some of the proteins, I believe) and has assorted additives placed in it, so it is not food grade. It’s perfectly safe to use on furniture, but I wouldn’t personally use it on a cutting board, salad bowl, or other wooden utensils.
Raw linseed oil is not poisionous.
I would not drink a glass full.
But its perfectly ok for treating cutting boards.
It takes forever to dry. So a special conditioning treatment might work better.
Be careful if you use tung oil. There are products labeled “tung oil” which are actually a mixture of tung oil, varnish and solvents. These are not food safe. For a cutting board you should use a product that is 100% tung oil; such a product is usually labeled “pure tung oil”.
I used something labeled as “food grade mineral oil” to seal a fancy wooden cutting board with a complex engraved picture. I followed the instructions that came with the board. I saturated the board and put it in as plastic bag to sit with the oil for a day. Then i did the same thing a second time. I’ve rubbed some more on, since.
I may have included some paper towels drenched in oil wrapped around the board, i don’t recall. I know the thing soaked up a LOT of oil. Like, i used a couple of cups of oil and a significant fraction of that was absorbed, and not discarded.
The board works well with juicy meat. I’m astonished at how easy the rough surface is to clean, honestly.
Then what about flaxseed oil? It is food grade and I believe very similar to linseed oil … at least as far as seasoning cast iron.
ETA: derp! Missed nearwildheaven’s post.
I don’t treat my cutting boards with anything. What is the point of doing that?
- It provides a reason for living and adds meaning to life
- It helps to ‘seal the pores’ of wood, reducing infiltration by bacteria (eg, the ‘juices’ from meat and poultry)
- It keeps the wood ‘supple.’ Wood is a bit of a sponge, absorbing and releasing moisture and expanding and contracting in the process. When ambient relative humidity varies widely (eg, seasonal swings), the glue joints that hold the boards together can (warp or) crack, givng you more than one – often, so small as to be useless – cutting board remnants.
I have cheap wooden cutting boards with the grain running parallel to the long axis of the board that i use for cutting. I didn’t treat those with anything. I avoid using them for raw meat, because they aren’t easy to sanitize, and for raw onions and garlic, because it’s hard to get the smell out, but i use them for everything else. I don’t treat those with anything. And yeah, sometimes one separates into two pieces too small to be useful. But not very often. I use them all the time, they are great.
I also have a fancy wooden “cutting” board with the grain running parallel to the shortest axis, so the flat, business side of the thing is end grain. And it’s engraved with a fancy picture. It was a souvenir from Hawaii, and it’s gorgeous. That’s the one i treated. If i hadn’t treated it, i couldn’t have used it, because all that end grain would soak up whatever liquid spilled out of my food, and stain it. And something like meat juice would also spoil, and make it smelly and not suitable for using with food. And that seems similar to what the OP described. I drenched that one with a food-safe oil to fill all those thirsty pores, as described above. And it worked! I’ve served a couple of large roasts on it, and it cleaned up nearly as well as a non-stick pan.
The OP and others are discussing pretty boards with inlays or pictures that they don’t want stained. Seems like a pain in the butt to me but I get it. My two cutting boards are bamboo and are completely utilitarian. Different strokes