Here Are Some Knife Friendly Wooden Steak Plate Options

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Nick_Hall

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I'd like to upgrade my steak knives to 120mm petty knives. The trouble is, I instantly lose my appetite every time I hear blue #2 grinding into ceramic with an audible scraping sound. It's a sound as distinctive as it is sickening (as anyone with nice steak knives and dinner guests can readily attest). What to do?

1. Make guests (and my family!) use cheap knives
2. Become a vegetarian
3. Buy knife friendly plates

Of the three choices, buying knife friendly plates seems like the most palatable option. Plastic plates are a lot more practical than wooden ones, but that's an aesthetic compromise I'm not yet ready to make. I was surprised to find that there really weren't many wooden plates that both looked good and were designed to be used as actual dinner plates (not chargers or decorative plates). I spent an embarrassing amount of time scouring the internet trying to find wooden plates that didn't look like a modified cutting board, so just in case there is anyone else as crazy as me, here are 4 options that I've found that would fit the bill. Please do post any other alternatives that you may have found.


Justinbois Plates: $29 in 10.5" Maple https://www.etsy.com/listing/216107420/la-siet-105-27cm-maple-wood-plate?ref=shop_home_active_9







Thierry Marx Beech plate: $29 in 11.5" Beech http://www.habitat.eu/p/beech-plate






Palumba Plate: $25 in 10"Maple http://www.palumba.com/wooden-plates.html






ManyThings: $11 each in 10" Rubberwood https://www.etsy.com/listing/230810641/3-wooden-plates-wooden-dinnerware?ref=market

 
4) Slice the meat correctly against the grain, and on a bias, back in the kitchen with your big 270mm sujihiki so guests can't mess it up. Fan the meat out, and sauce with a fancy looking chimichurri sauce or whatever.
 
Nice finds! I know your pain; I pretty much went through the catalog of every webshop in the country trying to find these... Surprisingly not even Ikea has them (even though they normally offer almost anything remotely practical or imaginable in wood or bamboo). I guess there isn't much of a market for them anymore in todays 'dishwasher' times.
 
@ IndoorOutdoorCook: Option 4 is what I have been doing, and although it's a big step up it still doesn't do the job. I've found that most normal folks are able to wreck an edge slicing a banana, and some edge-wrecking savants are capable of dulling Blue #1 or ZDP-189 just spreading jam on toast, it's amazing no matter how many times I see it. :scratchhead:

Most people have never actually used a truly sharp knife; when they do it's astonishing to them, a true revelation. That's why I want to have good knives at my table for my guests to use; so that they too can experience the joy of using a finely tuned, handmade tool. Watching the child-like joy that many people get slicing a perfectly cooked steak with razor sharp knife for the first time is tremendously fun; it's like watching my kids open presents on Christmas. Listening to carefully honed edges roll over takes a bit of the fun out of it for me, even though I enjoy sharpening.

I'd like to give everyone wooden plates so that no one (including me) has to think about anything other than a fine meal, with good friends. I don't want to instruct them on how to use knives or silently and grudgingly watch edge-abuse; I just want to sit back with a nice glass of wine while converting the occasional friend or colleague to the joys of japanese craftsmanship without distraction or worry.
 
I would love to give one of those plates to my brother-in-law. Just to see the grooves left in the plate from an extremely sharp Blue#2 as he hammer fisted through a steak.
The man hasn't a sharp knife in his house. I had to buy my sister a Wusthof 8" with a blade protector and teach her to hide it.:knife:
 
@ Bill13: Yeah, I love the first one by JustinBois too. It's like they took the exact image of what I was looking. The fit and finish is better than a lot of studio work (in the pictures at least, I haven't seen one in the flesh yet). Even more important to me than the aesthetics though, they've been in business for 11 years, offer a 2 year warranty, and they're website lists about 30 retail partners in Canada (mostly small Mom and Pop stores by the look of it). That says to me that they aren't making "dinner plate shaped objects" but rather actual functional dinnerware.

Given the thinness of the maple, and the hard duty that dinnerware suffers, they must be doing exceptional wood/grain selection, and excellent kiln drying of the rough maple planks. If grain selection isn't correct, or if the blanks aren't properly dried, the piece will warp and curl and crack with seasonal changes in humidity. The challenges of wood movement are particularly acute up in Quebec, Canada which is where JustinBois makes these things. The climate there is similar to upstate NY where I live, so if it's good enough for Quebec, it'll be good enough for my neck of the woods (or anywhere else for that matter). I'm a hobbyist woodworker and I build reproduction Shaker furniture in my small workshop, so I know how much poor wood/grain selection can bedevil a final piece. You've got to be pretty confident in your work to offer a 2 year warranty on Maple that thin.

$180 for 6 plates is about the price of 1 good petty, and it'll save the edges on 6 pettys for many years. If I placed a $/hr rate on my sharpening time, it's not that bad of a deal. For that matter, my old Henckels steak knives would probably hold a nice enough edge on these plates that I don't even need to upgrade knives (I probably will anyway though :)

I may have to order one plate to check out the craftsmanship. It's easy to do 1 nice plate for the photoshoot, I have no idea what they look like in real life. I'd just as soon not drop $180 if they're junk.
 
Here is another option. I like this one not just because it's handmade by a known maker, but because of his careful attention to wood grain. If you look at the grain of the wood, you'll notice that the grain is all parallel and linear. This is because this lumber was intentionally sawn this way from the log. It's enormously time consuming to cut the lumber to obtain this grain, so you rarely ever see quartersawn or riftsawn lumber, and when you do it costs an arm and a leg. My dad and I had a few thousand boardfeet of ash, birch, and maple lumber custom cut from our own trees a few years ago because quartersawn lumber is so damn hard to find. We also had it custom kiln dried in Rumford, Maine by an outfit that knows what it's doing. The reason you use quartersawn lumber is that it is much more dimensionally stable, so it won't cup or curl; it stays flat. If you've ever had a cutting board cup or curl on you, it's because the manufacturer cheaped out and used flatsawn lumber without carefully managing the flatsawn grain. You can use flatsawn lumber and still get good results, but you've got to know what you're doing.

At any rate I think this guy's doing it right. I'm not wild about the square shape or the $45 price tag, but it might be just what somebody out there is looking for. https://www.etsy.com/listing/213630146/beech-and-maple-plate?ref=shop_home_active_8

 
These are all a big step up from the acacia wood Ironwood BBQ plates I have. Maybe a group buy?
 
Well, I just bought one of the JustenBois plates in Maple to check out the workmanship. I can't wait for it to come in. The bad news is that the link says that it won't ship until Feb 3, which is a real bummer. Based on the size of the operation, I expected it to get pulled off the shelf and shipped same day. I guess it's possible that they're made to order since they're hand turned on a lathe.

Here is their website that shows their full range of products. http://www.justenbois.com/en/9-all

If you buy from them directly, there is free shipping after $35. I bought through etsy because it wound up being a few bucks cheaper since I didn't hit the free shipping minimum.



Here is a Youtube of the plates in use. I'm not into the wooden flatware, but the plates look incredible!

https://youtu.be/DaYh0MIl9UE
 
Tagged for interest, looking forward to your update once you receive your plate. Thanks!
 
Mrmnms: I've never actually used wooden plates, and I'm curious how people react when you set the table with the ironwood one's you have. Do you use them exclusively for BBQ/grilled meals or have you used them for other meals as well. How do guests react when they see them? I'd love to hear you're experiences.

For that matter, anybody else out there have wooden plates that they use on a regular basis?
 
I only use them for steaks, and only when I serve them unsliced. People think they're pretty cool. In have a couple custom Haburn steak knives that only come out with wood plates or funky little cutting boards. Makes me happy.
 
Too bad I don't eat meat anymore. Those Justinbois plates are nice.
 
That's weird, I didn't have any issues when I ordered mine (I live in upstate NY). They haven't arrived yet, but the purchase confirmation email said they would be shipped Feb 3rd. I bought mine through their etsy account, did you buy via etsy or direct from the website?
 
Well, I got in the maple plate from JustenBois and I'm blown away. I'm the kind of wood geek who subscribes to fine woodworking magazine and attends woodworking conferences. I've 4000 bdft of custom sawn, custom kiln dried lumber, and I spent $1,000 on lumber in just the past couple weeks. With that preamble out of the way, let me say that the plate I received was simply amazing.

Whoever was working the lathe when this piece was made is incredibly talented. Not only is the craftsmanship superb, and the grain selection impeccable, it's actually hard rock "flame maple" aka "tiger maple". The chatoyance is absolutely beautiful. It's hard to imagine that every plate is flame maple, given that it costs double what ordinary hard rock maple costs, but it was a wonderful surprise. I give this 2 thumbs up. I've been looking for the perfect wooden plate for a while now, and I can say definitively that my search is over.

I'll try to get some pics up tomorrow; I think I'll probably need some daylight to get adequate pictures of this baby!
 
Here are some pics of my new plate as promised. I'm not much of a photographer unfortunately. It's tough to capture the chatoyance in a picture but you can sort of see it in pic 2.







 
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