Keeping Your Counters New Looking, and their Patina too!

In our work, we build, buy, and install a lot of counters. Right now, we use a lot of commercial butcher block, and also make a lot of wood counters. Our friends Pat Garrett and Shane Thurston make a lot of slate and soapstone counters for us. Occasionally we get into granite tops. Recently we've been using a green MDF product called Valchromat, which is easy to work, and has some of the virtues of stone counters. We still do a little Formica since it is such an inexpensive option, and let's face it, works pretty well.

Recently some of our customers have gotten in touch with us because their counters didn't stay new-looking. One was a slate counter, with under-mount sink, that got a little spotty under the drain board. The other was oiled butcher block that got drab -looking over time, after several years of food prep. That's fine – we'll do our best to fix these problems.

This got me thinking about my own counters. I think, between the apartments I've rented, the houses we've owned or co-owned, my little boat, and my late-lamented trailer, I've build myself about 20 or 25 counters. A couple of early ones were plywood, coated with fiberglass. Several others were plywood that was heavily varnished with oil-based varnish. These were intended as temporary counters, but at least three are still in use decades later. But most of them were wooden planks, glued edge to edge. Usually they were made out of whatever wood came to hand. Walnut, ash, red oak, white oak (that's nice!), mahogany, teak, sometime pine. Most of these oiled counters are still in service, except for the ones in that late lamented trailer.

I always thought of these kitchens as workplaces, analogous more to a woodshop or restaurant kitchen than to some kind of showplace. The wood counters were oiled with ordinary salad oil, sometimes mineral oil or tung oil. We chopped veggies of all kinds right on the counter. We rolled out the dough right on the counter. Except for meat, and particularly poultry, most foods we ate were in direct contact with these counters. We learned to take one precaution: don't let that carbon steel knife sit in a puddle or orange juice for too long, or you'll have a nice black chevron that will have to be scraped out.

Here is my current batch. This is the before picture.

The island is made from some ash planks. The green ones are Fireslate II, a concrete counter similar to your counters in chem lab. To the left is a commercial Boos butcher block. In the distance is a varnished pine table I made about 40 years ago.

In the great tradition of kitchen photography, I took this occasion to do the annual maintenance which I do every three or four years. I scrubbed the counters, dried them off, and gave them another dose of salad oil, including the Fireslate II.

If I saw stains or other defects at this point, I could have sanded or scraped them out. But as you can see, I did not do that.

Right from the first day, these counters have taken a terrific beating. It would be impossible to count the scratches in this wood. After all, just cutting up three cloves of garlic might lead to fifty unkind cuts. These fifteen or twenty year old counters have been hacked thousands of times. They have also been stained and re-stained over and over by beets, strawberries, coffee and lots of other foods. They have been used and abused.

The hardwood tops can take this pretty well; they can always be brought back to reasonable condition, ad infinitum. The Fireslate, like some natural stones, can get stains. Because of how much water they get, the oil finish gets drawn out pretty fast. That poor soft pine table in the background has really suffered. It's got scratches, divots, places where ball point pens have sort of printed through onto the soft wood.

I love these counters. These are nice, honest materials. You could find counters made a century or five centuries ago that were made much the same way. They'll last pretty much forever, and if they fail, they can be repaired.

They tell a story. People have been living here! They cook for each other. They eat a lot of vegetables! They chop up their garlic instead of buying it powdered. Why, they don't even take good care of that nice pine table! I see these honorably damaged surfaces, and remember the meals, the singing parties, the pizzas, the bread dough. The bread I'm slicing now, is somehow linked to all the meals that came before, all the people I've spent time with here. To be sentimental, the worn surface has some meaning for me; I hope I get to see it even more battered, to see the surface even more uneven than today.

When I revisit some of their older cousins (now owned by other people) I see they are still being put to work on a daily basis. You have no idea what a good feeling that is for a carpenter, to see something you've made going strong years later.

As we work with families developing their kitchen designs, we talk about what functions they want each counter to serve. We talk about what material fits with the work done at that work station. We take them to see kitchens we did a few years ago. If we're using slate, I'd like them to see what it's going to look like in a few years.

If they want a counter that will stay new-looking a long time, maybe we'll end up with those granite tops, or engineered quartz, or even on occasion, “solid surface.” If they choose maple or ash or soapstone or slate, I'll be glad. But I'll also be careful to say (once burned, twice shy), “These are patina materials. They'll last a long time, but they'll show their history, too.”