Have you succumbed to middle-class-benchtop syndrome?

I didn’t mind the old kitchen benchtop.  It was a perfectly fine laminated benchtop in a tasteful ’80’s salmon-pink with tiny black flecks running through it, handy for hiding poppy seeds and sleeping baby roaches. But tragically, my beloved came down with a bout of Middle-Class Industrial-Chic Wanky-Kitchen Syndrome –  it’s a thing, people get it.

She decided she wanted everything in the kitchen to have a hard-edged stainless-steel vibe, including the oven, the fridge, the dishwasher, the toaster, and the tea towels.  And the kitchen benchtop too: she got the old laminated one ripped out and a new stainless steel one put in, and now our kitchen was complete – a stainless steel wonderland, like some kind of super-stylish urinal in a hip rooftop bar that nobody’s quite sure how to use.

I didn’t mind the new kitchen benchtop.  It was a perfectly fine surface for preparing your foodstuffs, as long as you weren’t preparing anything more abrasive or gritty than wholemeal bread.  Because stainless steel has a very unique physical property, known in metallurgical terminology as “flippin’ scratchiness”.   You put down a pot, scratchhhhhh, you lay down a knife, scratchhhhhh, you drop a marshmallow, scratchhhhhh.

My beloved said this was normal, that the benchtop would build up a nice “patina” over time, which is a Latin word meaning “the natural change of a surface through age and wear until it looks like a toddler went at it with a rotary-grinder”.   But this “flippin’ scratchiness” wasn’t the worst of our problems: stainless steel also has another unique chemical property, referred to in academic circles as “frickin’ smudginess”.   Anytime your hand makes contact with stainless steel, all the oils are leeched from your skin, leaving a grease glob that is very hard to remove – you rub at it with a sponge and it just shifts to a new position, you rub at it harder and it just spreads wider, you rub at it even harder, scratchhhhhh.

There is a brief moment every morning at exactly 7:42 am when the sunlight comes through the kitchen window at a specific angle and you can see every smudge, smear and streak on every single stainless steel surface – but thankfully the light changes at 7:45 a.m and you can go on with your day pretending you saw nothing.

I am stuck with this new kitchen benchtop but to be honest, it’s not the most idiotic, irritating, impractical kitchen-benchtop around.  We know people with kitchen benchtops made of aluminum roof-flashing, which may be the kind that gives you Alzheimer’s, they can’t remember.  We know people with kitchen benchtops made of reconstituted Volcanic stone that can’t be exposed to red wine, lemon-juice, or any other type of liquid, including water.   We know people with kitchen benchtops made from ancient marble that may have once been a piece of The Parthenon – it’s so delicate, they can’t put anything on top of it and have to do all their food-preparation in mid-air, holding bowls, knives, implements, and a Thermomix. And whenever they have to put something down on the benchtop, they bring out kitchen-benchtop protector-mats. Laminated ones.
Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.