“When the old groves above Lucca are cut back, the trunks end up on a bonfire. For thirty-six years I have been turning them into cutting boards in Dorset instead.” — Enzo Togneri (66) makes every board from one solid piece of Tuscan olive wood.

His father, Giovanni, was a Tuscan farm boy captured in North Africa in 1942 and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in Dorset. He was put to work on a farm outside Blandford, fell for a girl from Poole and never went home. For the rest of his life he talked about the family olive grove on the hills above Lucca. Enzo became a joiner. In January 1985 the hardest frost anyone in the village could remember killed his uncle’s grove to the ground — the roots survived, the trunks did not — and Enzo drove down to help clear them. He brought a van load home to Dorset. Thirty-six years after he cut his first board from that wood, it is still the only thing he makes.

A wet October morning in Dorset. The workshop is a converted outbuilding behind the house on the edge of Blandford Forum. The smell is sawdust, linseed oil, and something faintly sweet and resinous — the olive wood itself, which never quite loses the scent of the grove. On the back wall hang a dozen hand planes in descending order of size, and a single photograph: a terraced hillside above Lucca, thick with old olive trees, taken the summer before the frost.

“My father talked about that grove his whole life,” he says. “He never went back — first he couldn’t, then he had a family here. But every Christmas a tin of my uncle’s oil turned up on our table in Dorset. I grew up thinking olive trees were something you inherited.”

The 1985 trip changed everything. The frost had come in January, well below minus fifteen on the hillside for nights on end. By spring the whole valley had gone brown. The only thing the farmers could do was cut every tree down to the stump and wait for the roots to send up new shoots. The trunks were stacked along the lanes and burned.

“I watched the first bonfire and went to bed,” Enzo says. “In the morning I asked my uncle what he wanted for the rest. He looked at me as if I was simple. They were getting rid of it.” He emptied the tools out of his work van, loaded it as full as it would go and drove it north through France to the ferry. “It took two days. My wife thought I had lost my mind. Then the wood sat in the barn for five years before it was dry enough to cut.”

Why most wooden boards don’t last

“People always buy the cheap one first,” he says. “Twelve months later the middle has gone dark, there’s a split down one side and it wobbles on the worktop. So they buy another. The same one again.”

Problem one: the glue seam. Nearly every wooden board you can buy is three or four thin strips pressed together and sanded until they pass for one piece in a photo. They aren’t. Water gets into the joins, and the strips swell and shrink at different rates through the seasons. Within a couple of years the seam goes dark, and no amount of oil or sanding brings it back.

Problem two: wood that was dried in a hurry. Green olive wood is more than half water by weight. Dry it too fast to hit a production schedule and it holds on to stress you cannot see — until the board is in your kitchen. Then it checks: a hairline crack that appears a few weeks after delivery, for no obvious reason.

Enzo bins one blank in five to catch that before anything ships. The glue problem he simply doesn’t have — there is nothing to glue in a board cut from one piece.

Once the seam goes, the board is finished

Every few weeks someone turns up in the yard with a cutting board under their arm. It is never one of Enzo’s. These are boards from kitchen shops and department stores, some of them not cheap, used for a year or two before something gave way. He keeps them in a crate by the door: a walnut board with a black line where the glue failed, a beech one that swelled and split after a single trip through the dishwasher, a bamboo one peeling apart in layers like wet cardboard.

“Nine times out of ten I can tell you what went wrong in a few seconds,” he says. “What I can’t do is fix it. When a glue seam opens, that’s the end of the board. Sand it, oil it, clamp it for a week — the line comes back.”

Most of them drive home with one of his. One piece of olive wood, no seam, no glue — nothing to fail.

What your plastic chopping board leaves behind

In 2023, researchers at North Dakota State University measured something few people had ever thought about: how much of a cutting board ends up in the food when a knife hits it, day after day, over a year of normal cooking.

On ordinary white plastic chopping boards — the sort in most British kitchens — they estimated between 14 and 79 million microscopic plastic particles a year . Their equipment could only pick up particles above a certain size, so the true figure is likely higher.

Every board sheds a little of itself under the knife. With plastic, that means plastic — which does not break down in food or in the body. With wood, it means wood fibre. What you cut on decides what ends up on the plate.

Why Enzo’s board is different

• A single slab: Cut from one piece of olive wood rather than built up from strips. Turn it over and the grain runs unbroken from one face to the other.
• Saved, not felled: The wood comes from trunks cut back in the olive groves above Lucca after frost, renewal or clearance. No living, fruiting tree is felled for these boards.
• Hard enough to stay smooth: Around 2,710 on the Janka hardness scale — nearly twice as dense as beech — so it resists the deep scoring that turns cheaper boards grey and grubby.
• Dried slowly, then rested: Months in the open air of a Dorset barn, a kiln cycle, then another rest before any blade touches it. This is what separates a board that lasts from one that splits.
• Finished before it leaves: Hand-scraped and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No raw wood, no dust, no workshop smell — it comes ready for the kitchen.
• The only one like it: Every board comes from a different tree, so weight, colour and grain all vary. The one you get is the only one of its kind.

Chop on one side, serve on the other

Enzo scrapes and oils both faces of every board. “My father never had a separate board for the table,” he says. “You cut on it, you turned it over, you put it in the middle.” One side takes the knife — onions and garlic midweek, the Sunday roast at the weekend. The other goes out with a wedge of cheddar, some chutney and a loaf. One piece of wood, two jobs, and on the table it looks nothing like kitchen kit.

What his customers say

• “I bought it for my husband when he retired and very nearly kept it for myself. He turned it over three times looking for a join. It went straight into the kitchen and hasn’t been put away since — six months on, it’s still out on the worktop every day.”

  – Sarah T. , 56, Bath, Somerset

• “The grain carries right through to the underside, which is how you know it’s one piece. My old board was four strips and the centre seam had gone black. I’ve used this one daily for nine months. No marks I mind, and it still sits dead flat.”

  – David P. , 62, Edinburgh

• “I chop on one side and serve cheese on the other. I used to own a chopping board and a separate serving board. Now I have one, and it looks better than both of them did.”

  – Claire W. , 59, Norwich, Norfolk

Just him, and his two hands

Enzo is 66 and works on his own. No second bench, no apprentice, nobody waiting to take over. “It takes years before you understand the wood,” he says. “You can’t hurry that, and nobody has the patience for it anymore.”

In a good week, what leaves the workshop is whatever one man can cut, dry, shape and oil by himself — minus the one board in five that never gets packed. That is all there is. No factory version, no warehouse behind it.

His daughter Sofia (32) built the online shop after eight winters of watching him stand behind a trestle table at Dorset markets. “Dorchester, Blandford, Sherborne — every Saturday from September until Christmas, whatever the weather,” she says. “I told him he didn’t have to do it anymore. It took two conversations.”

Where to buy Enzo’s board

You can only buy it through his daughter’s online shop. It isn’t in any high street shop, on any marketplace or with any distributor.

Worth knowing if you compare: a glued board with a natural edge looks almost identical to a single piece in photos. The difference is on the underside — the grain either runs clean from end to end or stops dead at a seam.

Chop on it. Put it on the Christmas table. If it isn’t right — size, weight, grain, anything — send it back within ninety days for a full refund. No restocking fee, no questions.