Can You Boil or Dishwasher Wooden Spoons?

No to the dishwasher. Boiling: only as a last resort, and not as a habit.

A dishwasher cycle combines three things wood handles badly at once — sustained heat, aggressive detergent, and long contact with standing water. Wooden utensils come out warped, rough, faded, or split, and it can happen on the first run.

Boiling is different. It will not make a spoon unsafe, and it is sometimes suggested for sanitising. But it soaks the wood right through and raises the grain, so you trade a small, temporary benefit for a spoon that feels fuzzy and dries out faster afterwards.

Wood is hygroscopic: it takes on and gives off moisture as its surroundings change, swelling and shrinking as it does. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Handbook describes cracking as what happens when that movement is uneven across the grain and the resulting stress exceeds what the wood can hold.

A dishwasher creates exactly those conditions. The wood saturates during the wash, then a hot drying cycle pulls moisture out of the surface far faster than from the core. The outside shrinks while the inside is still swollen, and something has to give — usually a split running along the grain, or a bowl that no longer sits flat.

Detergent adds a second problem. Dishwasher detergent is far more alkaline than hand soap, and it strips oils and wax finishes out of the surface, which is why a dishwashed spoon often looks bleached and grey as well as rough.

People usually boil wooden spoons for one of two reasons: to sanitise them, or to pull out embedded odours and grease. Neither one is a strong enough reason to make it routine.

If you have a specific reason to do it — a spoon that touched raw chicken and you want the reassurance — a couple of minutes in simmering water will not ruin a well-made piece. Then dry it thoroughly, let it come back to room temperature slowly away from direct heat, and condition it once it is fully dry, because boiling will have pulled oils out of the surface.

What we would not do is boil utensils on a schedule. A proper hand wash handles daily hygiene; we look at what the research says about wood and bacteria in are wooden cooking utensils sanitary?

The routine that actually keeps wooden spoons clean and intact is unglamorous:

Wash by hand in warm water with a little mild soap, working with the grain. Dry immediately with a towel — do not leave it on the rack to air dry. Store it somewhere with airflow, not sealed damp in a drawer or container. Condition it every few weeks, or whenever the wood looks pale and feels rough.

That is the whole thing. Our step-by-step version lives in how to clean wooden spoons, and the full care routine including storage is in our olive wood care guide.

If the damage is cosmetic — grey, dull, rough, fuzzy to the touch — it is usually recoverable. Let the piece dry completely for a day, sand it very lightly with fine grit paper in the direction of the grain if the surface has raised, then work a food-safe oil or a beeswax balm deep into it, leave it a few hours or overnight, and wipe off the excess. Repeat if it drinks the first coat straight in.

We use a beeswax-and-cold-pressed-linseed-oil balm on every piece before it leaves our workshop, and we sell the same one — Olive Wood Care Balm — because it holds up longer between treatments than plain oil.

If the piece has split through, warped so it no longer sits flat, or has a crack you can flex, it is done as a cooking tool. Full walkthrough of the recovery process: how to fix dry, grey, or fuzzy wooden utensils.

The rule is the same across hardwoods — olive, beech, maple, teak, acacia. None of them belong in a dishwasher.

What does change is how long the damage takes to show. Density and grain structure decide how fast water moves into and out of a piece. Olive wood is one of the denser, tighter-grained woods used for kitchen utensils, so it saturates more slowly and often survives a cycle or two before the first crack appears. Softer, open-grained woods — the pine, rubberwood, and loose beech used in inexpensive utensil sets — take on water fast and can warp or fuzz on the first run. Surviving a cycle is not the same as being fine: the stress is still going into the grain either way.

That same density is why olive wood is generally regarded as one of the better woods for utensils that get used every day, and why a well-cared-for olive wood spoon can outlast a decade of cheap replacements. It is a head start, not immunity.

If you are still choosing what to buy, our olive wood vs bamboo vs plastic comparison covers the honest tradeoffs, including which materials tolerate a dishwasher and what you give up for that convenience, and you can see what we make in our olive wood utensils collection.