Today you can hardly find a house without a wooden spoon. We use wooden utensils for cooking, eating, measuring ingredients or just as a decoration. Historically wooden cooking spoons were made of hardwood and they were always very popular all over the world. Even today there are a lot of craftsmen who produce millions of wooden cooking spoons a year to cover the consumer demand.
Today modern craftsmen produce wooden spoons with a help of a special equipment that allows them to lessen manual work and at the same time increase their production. But still there are people who enjoy the manual process of wooden spoons crafting and in this article we would like to show you how a wooden spoon is made.
It starts very simple. A master takes a wooden log and splits it in half with a help of an ax, and then in a few more poles. A number of poles depend on the size of the log and the expected number of spoons. As each single pole is going to be a spoon.
They say that everyone can make a wooden spoon. All you need is a piece of wood, knife and desire. Yet the first spoon you make can look ugly and crooked, but still it may function very well. To make a good looking and decent wooden spoon you need a set of simple tools that you can find in any house.
A wooden spoon can be done almost out of any hardwood. Most often wooden kitchen utensils are made of birch-tree, beechwood, maple, oak or fruit trees. Coniferous trees are not suitable for wooden spoons as they are softer and have a specific odor.
A craftsman is using a template of a future spoon that he applies on the cleaned up wooden pole. Depending on the purpose of the spoon, there are spoons of different forms – round, oval, flat or bulky.
Clutching the piece of wood in a vice, a master cuts the wood off the future spoon. By the way, unlike other type of wood carving, spoons are made of raw wood and then dried out when they are ready. Some craftsmen store tree logs in high grass so that the wood would not dry out.
With a help of an ax a master gives a form to the back of the spoon. Any tool will do for this stage of the process. You can cut the excess of the wood with the help of a knife, hacksaw or chisel, it just depends on how much time and effort you want to spend.
After you finish this first cutting stage, a spoon looks like a hemisphere – it is deep, bulky and not very comfortable to use yet, but its form is already closer to a classical wooden spoon. This process doesn’t take much skill and anyone can do the job. In general, another ten minutes of work with a knife and you will have a completely usable spoon. This is exactly where the master’s work starts. The wooden spoon should not only be functional, but also beautiful.
Once the handle is ready, it is time to scrape out the scoop of the spoon. Usually they keep the width of the walls 3-4 millimeters. Because if they do them thinner, the spoon might be more beautiful but less practical as it will serve less time. A craftsman carefully removes the unnecessary part of wood in order to grind it later.
Once a spoon is cut out it is left for drying. The best way is just to leave it outside in a warm summer weather for a couple of days or on the stove in winter.
When it comes to grinding a wooden spoon, you can do it manually using a sandpaper or with a help of a machine. Of course if you are doing a wood spoon for fun, a sandpaper will be just fine, but in order to produce multiple wooden spoons, a special equipment is required. Very quickly a spoon becomes smooth and obtains a nice look. But don’t be deceived, a wooden spoon must be sanded in few stages with a reduced granularity of the sandpaper or a machine.
With the contact with water, a wood spoon becomes rougher. You can hardly feel it with hands, but it is not pleasant when eating. Therefore, after grinding a spoon is wetted and dried again, and then polished once more. They repeat this process few times in order to reach the maximum quality and smoothness of the wood.
Finally the wooden spoons are almost ready. The last stoke is to coat them with oil. Some massive wooden kitchen utensils are soaked in oil for a while, as for the spoons, it is enough to brush them with oil as they are thin and oil will soak through. During the next 24 hours the spoons are left a side to dry out and absorb oil, then they are wiped with dry cloth and they are ready.
Wooden utensils made by hands add warmth to our houses. If you don’t have a wooden spoon yet, it’s a high time to think of getting one.
At ECOSALL we design and manufacture different shapes and sizes of wood cooking utensils to meet all cooking needs of our customers. Our wooden spoons for cooking are made from 100% natural high quality European hardwood, mostly Beechwood that makes them strong, durable, healthy and safe for you and your family.
Visit our Amazon store to choose your favorite wooden spoon >>
