I actually served myself lunch in the dish bento the other day. Here’s what it looks like:
Maple Bento with Dishes of Food
Starting in the upper left, I had:
Kimchi (from a jar) and pickled radish (home made)
Simmered kabocha squash with dried shiso sprinkle
Shredded fresh napa cabbage with sesame dressing
Rice with flaked salmon, sesame seeds, and aonori
Mackerel (from a tin) with plum sauce and naruto maki kamaboko
Marinated poached lotus root, roasted japanese eggplant, and shiitake mushrooms with black bean sauce
Lots of food, to be sure, but mostly vegetables, fruits, and grains. I don’t always have this much variety, but sometimes I go a little overboard when I’m grocery shopping. Such hardship, I know.
A while back, probably a year or two ago, I bought six small-ish (4 inches across) “Black/Red” melamine dishes from one of the Asian markets here in Pittsburgh. See, the problem with most bento is that the tray inside is so big that you can’t actually fit it in the dishwasher. I figured that if I got a few small dishes, then made a box to hold them, I could use the collection as a bento box. Once I’d used the dishes to hold lunch “courses”, I could pull them out and line them up in the dishwasher rack.
Dish Bento from Maple
Here is what the box and lid look like with the dishes inside. You can see that the lid has a little lip around it, but it is basically the same construction as the body, only slightly larger. The corners are mitered, and the surfaces (lid surface, body floor) are rabetted to fit into dadoes in the lip/sides. There are no fasteners in the box, just glue and finish. I did most of the cutting and mitering on the band saw, and did the rabbets and dadoes on the router table.
Dish Bento Body with Dishes
The body interior is just a little bit larger and deeper than the bowls themselves. The interior is about 12.125″ by 8.125″ and 2 inches deep. The maple is 0.375″ thick, so it is sturdy enough to hold the densest of lunches.
Dish Bento Body
The panels that make up the floor and lid surface are actually “book matched”. I started with a 7/8″-thick rough board, then re-sawed it into two thinner boards using my band saw. Then, a few passes through the planer to smooth it out. That’s why the grain doesn’t match up exactly, because my wavy resaw cuts meant more grain was lost to the planer.
Dish Bento Lid
The entire box is finished with “General Finishes” brand ‘Wood Bowl Finish‘, which used to be marketed as ‘Salad Bowl Finish’. This is an oil-based urethane finish intended for food contact. They have taken care with the solvents so that once the finish is cured it is non-toxic and as safe as they can manage. It is much less stinky than the polyurethanes I tend to use, and it dries very hard like lacquer. Due to the (intentional) loose fit of the panels in the edges/walls, the box is not water-tight, but the wood is thoroughly sealed.
Eleven years ago, I made this hexagonal bento box in a class taught by Pittsburgh’s Tadao Arimoto. At the time, I did not know much about making bento lunches, so the box mostly sat on a shelf as a display piece. It waited patiently for me to expand my studies of Japanese culture to include food, and for me to start shopping at the Tokyo Japanese grocery enough to develop a menu for lunch. Back in 2019, I started making bento lunches to eat at work, and I discovered that the box was not sealed! I got salad dressing all over the tablecloth, and had to use plastic bento boxes for my lunch.
A year or two ago, I sanded the inside and outside of the box to smooth out the uneven epoxy surface. The box sat in this state for a couple of years, still waiting for me to make time for it. This summer, I finally cleared off the workbench for a couple of days so that I could mix up some epoxy and refinish the box.
These are the pieces of the box. One lid, one base, and two rhomboid containers that fit inside the base.
Here are the smaller containers inside the base, ready for filling.
Add the lid to close the box. It falls slowly because the tolerances are tight.
It’s completely sealed now. I could probably take soup in it. The lid edges are almost the full height of the box, so it might not even spill very much if tipped. Even though I don’t go into the office at all these days, I made lunch at home and served it to myself in this box because I believe you should always let things fulfill their purpose.
Hana Goshoku onigiri; pickles and salad; togarashi tofu, roasted mushrooms, and kamaboko; lotus root and roasted eggplant.
