Where are my foul excretions? What happened when I boiled my wooden spoons

Should you ever need to explain TikTok to the uninitiated, sell it this way: a woman in America boiled her wooden spoons and made a video of it, which 49 million people have watched so far.

The woman in question, Lulaboo Jenkins, is not alone. All across TikTok, people are boiling their wooden spoons to see what disgusting gunk leaches out of them. Wooden spoons are foul, so the lesson goes, harbouring the remains of every meal you’ve stirred with them. Faced with this startling information, I could think of no other way forward: I had to boil my spoons.

I’m not the sort of hygiene freak who loses sleep over unsterile utensils. While searching for a pot big enough to boil my spoons in, I found one that had been put back in the cupboard still containing the remains of a meal I cooked over a month ago, a stew now furred over with grey mould. I will lose some sleep over that.

The craze for spoon-boiling is nothing new. Back in 2020 people were soaking their spoons in boiling water and reporting the results on Facebook, seemingly in response to advice from Australian MasterChef judge Matt Preston who came up with his “wooden spoon test” as far back as 2016. “Stick an old one in a cup of boiling water to see what fate awaits all wooden spoons,” he wrote. Any revolting brown residue suggests you have owned that spoon too long – time for a new one.

I don’t know how old my wooden spoons are – I can’t recall ever having bought one, even though they occasionally break or catch fire. Some are probably as old as my marriage. But I’ve never worried about cooking with them, although I tend not to leave them standing in a sauce or soup, because someone once told me it makes the dish taste of spoon.

The theory presented here – that wooden utensils absorb the oils you cook with, and that this is bad, and that regular boiling is the only solution – is not universally accepted. Another TikTok video, from America’s Test Kitchen, suggests you should never boil your wooden spoons – they will dry out and crack – but that you should occasionally oil them to prolong their life. I didn’t see this until after my spoons were boiling.

After 30 minutes I remove the spoons. The water is a few shades darker – a kind of weak tea you might expect to get from boiling wood for half an hour, with none of the foul excretions I had been promised. I have to admit that, after encountering that mouldy stew, I find it difficult to get worked up about this.