Maple is probably your best bet. With cutting boards you need a close grained wood. Maple and fruit woods like cherry, apple or pear are great, but maple is the most common.
Oak is coarser grained and quite porous. You can do party tricks with oak, especially red oak, by inserting a piece of wood in a tub of water, end grain sticking up, and blowing into the end grain, bubbles will appear in the water. Mahogany is quite porous as well. Teak is fantastic stuff--for boats, but not for cutting boards. Teak is naturally oilly, great for boats, but not good for glueing pieces of teak together. Teak also contains small bits of silica, very hard on knives, and a lot of woodworkers hate it because working with teak is very hard on tools and cutting edges. Beautiful wood though....
Like others have said, mineral oil is best for treating boards, it's commonly sold as an aid for constipation in most drugstores, and this is what 99% of all the other "Butcher block oils" made of. Pastes made of mineral oil and beeswax are very good as well, but much more expensive.
Stay away from vegetable oils. Not only will they go rancid eventually, but also they get sticky and gooey as they dry.
Wood is a natural material, it will swell with humidity increases and shrink with humidity losses and direct heat. This is the bane of every furniture maker, and th only thing to do is to compensate for swelling and shrinking by desiging the piece for this movement. And people have been doing it for thousands of years. I've worked with salavaged lumber over a 100 yers old and it still moves with seasonal and humidty changes. Some species don't move as much as others, and a lot has to do with how the log was cut: flat sawn moves significantly more than quartersawn or rift sawn lumber. It's the nature of the beast.
Wood will alos absorb some odours, like garlic, and colours, like chopped herbs, beets, or berries. This can be bleached out with common Javex or the like.
Above all, keep the board free of deep scars and scratches. Take it to a woodworker with a thickness planer, or get a cabinet scraper and remove the damaged wood yourself.  |