finish for a cheese board?

Chaps,

I am I the process of making a cou7pleof cheese boards for the Dragon.

The boards are made up of various timbers.

I was thinking of using Cabots Cabothane clear.

Ay ideas.


Thanks

Pappy

Leave them raw if you are not selling them. They will develop their own patina during use.

How about UBeauts food safe finish?

Parafin Oil. You can buy it at the chemist. Food safe as well.

I do what simple physics dictates.
Preheat your oven to 350F
Slop the board up with good olive oil.
On a rack over a sheet pan, put the board(s) into the oven for no more than 4 minutes.
Short, thin and fine,m 3 minutes would be better.
I do all my carved, sanded & branded kitchen sticks this way.
WATCH THE CLOCK. or they cook like French Fries, OK?

The heat causes the surface wood air to expand. Out of the oven, that cools and contracts,
sucking the oil way down inside the surface wood.

You can't come close to approximating the physics of this at room temperature with any oil on the planet.

So you soak a tool in oil at room temp.
a) Anything hot (kitchen sink water?) and all your oil finish gets blown out into the sink water.
As the wood cools, it sucks dirty sink water into the fiber.

b) So you make a big pot of soup. All your oil finish gets blown off into the soup pot.
Out of the soup, the spoon cools and old soup juice gets sucked down into the wood.
There, it decomposes so your spoon looks like the butt-end of a compost box = black.


One of the guys in the Diamond Willow shop down my village street got the hot and steamies to make cheese boards from beautiful, cheap & local birch (Betula papyrifera.) He bakes them as per my instructions. Claims it can't be washed off (true).

Some crap-artist will want to say that olive oil will go rancid. They are foolish enough to think that the oil sucked down into the wood is still exposed to oxygen/air (like on their dirty cupboard shelf). Nope. Can't happen.

Ubeaut food safe finish for me. Looks great, especially for gifts. If it's for friends and family, I offer (as part of the gift) an annual maintenance checkup (or 10,000km, whichever comes first!) where I re-oil (or for furniture, re-wax) the gift.

Takes me 20 mins for a big item and much less for a board, yet I know it is being maintained. Nothing like someone being disappointed in your joinery after they soak their breadboard in the sink every night. #notmyfault

Trav

Thanks chaps for the advice, I went with the "Ubeaut"
finish and they look a treat.



Pappy