“When a grove above Lucca is cut back, the trunks are burned. For thirty-six years I have been making chopping boards out of them instead.” — Enzo Togneri (66) makes every board from a single solid piece of Tuscan olive wood. Now his hands are making him stop.

His father grew up among the olive trees above Lucca before the war brought him to Dorset. When frost killed the family grove in 1985, every trunk was headed for a bonfire — and Enzo pulled one of them off. Thirty-six years on, that same chopping board — cut from one piece of wood, never glued up from strips — is still the only thing he makes. This batch will be his last.

Blandford Forum, October. The workshop is a brick outbuilding behind the house, and it smells of sawdust, warm machine oil and, just faintly, olives. The bench is worn pale in two spots where his forearms rest. A bandsaw, four hand planes and a single photograph hang on the wall: his father, his uncle and a donkey on the terraces above Lucca in 1938. Dorset is a long way from Tuscany, but in Enzo’s family the grove above Lucca was simply where the oil on the table came from.

“My uncle Piero kept those trees,” Enzo says. “My father grew up between them. I picked there every autumn as a boy.” Then came the frost of January 1985. Trees that freeze to the core are cut to the stump and burned, and the whole hillside went that way in a single spring. Enzo was twenty-four.

“I was not saving a tree,” he says. “That tree was already gone. I just could not stand there and watch that wood burn.” He brought one trunk home to Dorset in the back of his work van, over on the ferry. It sat in a barn drying for five years. The first board he cut from it went to his mother. It is still on a worktop in Poole, used every day for thirty-six years.

Two things that ruin a wooden chopping board

“Everyone buys the cheap one once,” he says. “Twelve months later the middle has gone grey, the glue seam has opened and it rocks when you chop. So you buy another.”

The first is the glue seam. Flip almost any wooden board over and you will count four or five narrow strips, glued together and sanded flat so they pass for one piece. They don’t. Water creeps into the seams, the strips work against each other through a year of seasons, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil will close.

The second is wood that was dried too quickly. A freshly cut olive trunk is more than half water. Enzo air-dries his wood for months, finishes it in a kiln, then rests it again before a saw ever touches it. Skip that step and the board looks perfect on the day it arrives, then shows a hairline crack six weeks later for no reason you can see.

He throws out one board in five to stay ahead of the second problem. The first one he doesn’t have at all — there is nothing in his board to glue.

Why a glued board can’t be saved

Most weeks someone turns up at the workshop with a board under their arm, asking him to save it. Never one of his — these are boards bought in a shop or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a year or two. In the corner sits a crate of the ones he had to hand back: a maple one with a black line down the middle where the glue gave way, one gone soft in the centre after a few runs through the dishwasher, a bamboo one that split into three layers like a wet book.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is put them back together. “There’s nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once a glue seam opens, that board is done. Sand it, oil it, leave it in the sun for a week. The line comes back.”

Most of those people go home with one of his instead. One chopping board, one piece of Tuscan olive wood and nothing else — no strips, no glue, no seam waiting to open two years from now.

What comes off a plastic chopping board

In 2023, engineers at North Dakota State University measured something nobody had bothered to measure before: what actually comes off a chopping board when a knife hits it again and again, the way it does in a real kitchen.

On common white plastic chopping boards, the answer was somewhere between 14 and 79 million tiny plastic particles a year , depending on the plastic. Their equipment could only count the larger ones, so the real figure is higher.

Every board gives up a little of itself under a blade. What matters is what it gives up. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic doesn’t break down — not in the bin, not in the ground, not in you. Wood gives up wood.

What makes Enzo’s chopping board different

• One solid piece: Sawn from a single slab, never glued up from strips. The dark grain runs from the top face right through to the back — that’s how you can tell.
• Rescued, not felled: The wood comes from frost damage and grove clearances above Lucca. No living tree is cut to make a board.
• Hard enough to keep its face: Olive rates around 2,710 on the scale woodworkers use for hardness — roughly twice as hard as maple — so knife marks stay shallow rather than turning into grooves.

• Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, a kiln cycle, then another rest before the first cut. It’s the step cheap boards skip.
• Food-safe finish only: Hand-scraped and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No varnish, no sealant, nothing to flake off into your food.
• No two alike: Each board comes out of a different trunk, so size, weight, colour and grain all vary. Yours is the only one like it.

One board, two sides, two jobs

Enzo scrapes and oils both faces, because he knows how a chopping board really gets used. One side takes the knife — onions, herbs, a chicken. Flip it over and the other side goes on the table with cheese, olives, bread and a knife stuck in the middle. One board, two jobs, and nothing about it looks like a kitchen tool once the guests arrive.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I bought it for my mother’s eightieth and very nearly kept it. She turned it over twice looking for the joins, then called my sister into the kitchen to have a look. It’s been on her worktop since May and she’s started apologising to guests for using it, which I take as a good sign.”

  – Helen M. , 58, Bath, Somerset

• ★★★★★

  “The dark grain runs right through to the back, which is how you know it’s one piece. My old board was four strips and the centre seam had gone black. I cut on this every day, oil it once a month, and eight months on it still sits dead flat on the worktop. No rocking, no splits, nothing.”

  – Graham K. , 64, Harrogate, North Yorkshire
• ★★★★★

  “I chop on one side and put the other side on the table with cheese on it. That used to be two things I owned and now it’s one — and the one looks better than either of them ever did.”

  – Linda L. , 61, Norwich, Norfolk

One man, one pair of hands

Enzo is 66 and works alone. There’s no second bench in the workshop, no apprentice, nobody in the family who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a wooden board anymore.”

What leaves that workshop in a good week is what one man can saw, dry, scrape and oil on his own — and one in five of those ends up in the burn barrel before it’s ever wrapped. That is the whole supply. No factory behind it, no second batch sitting on a shelf somewhere.

His daughter Sofia (32) set up the little online shop for him over a single weekend. “At my age I don’t know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I wasn’t going to spend another winter behind a trestle table at the Dorchester market in the cold. She was right.”

Why this is Enzo’s last batch

Turning wood that was meant for a bonfire into something beautiful is what Enzo loves. But olive is one of the hardest woods there is, and at 66 his hands have had enough. “Some days I can’t hold a mug of tea properly until ten o’clock,” he says. “A full day at the bench costs me the next one.”

There is nobody to hand the workshop on to — no apprentice, and Sofia has a family and a job of her own. The trunks stacked in the barn are the last he will cut.

Where can you buy Enzo’s chopping board?

The chopping board is sold only through Backroad Goods , the small shop Sofia runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in a shop, not through anyone else. When this batch is gone, the shop closes with the workshop.

A word of warning: a glued-up board with a natural edge looks almost exactly like a single piece in a listing photo. The difference only shows on the back, where the grain either runs straight through or stops at a seam.

Chop on it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people at Christmas. If it isn’t right — the size, the weight, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.