When I “went to college” at Purdue, I stayed in the dorm all 4 years. What can I say? I liked the convenience of someone else cleaning the bathrooms and doing the cooking. For freshman year — and second half of senior year, because I had such a light schedule — I worked in the kitchen, for fun and profit. I usually ran the grill and deep fryers. I have a knack for keeping track of time in my head, and I almost never (like, only once) ever burned food.
After working a supper shift, everyone had a cleaning job. If you ran the grill, of course, it was to clean it. They had these “bricks” to help with the job. (I’ve attached a screenshot of one from Amazon, but that price seems high. I’m sure you could do much better from some commercial kitchen supply place.) Anyway, the first time I had to do it, it was explained to me by a shift supervisor that this was a hard job, and it took most people 2-3 hours to do, and they gave me one of these griddle bricks to help.
The brick they gave me was worn down, and literally caked with grease. All the little pores that you can see in the picture were clogged. The front of the thing looked smooth. I started scraping with it, and noticed that, while the thing was very hard, it was also brittle. I noticed that you could “crunch” the brick if you leaned on the edge. This would expose a new “row” of pore edges to actually scrape gunk off the grill. Once I figured this out, I used a spatula to shave off all the clogged part of the brick, and figured out a technique of very slowly rotating the brick, while putting all my weight on the edge. This move kept gradually exposing a new set of “teeth” as I worked the brick, and cleaned the grill. In direct opposition of what I had just been told, it worked amazingly well.
On my first attempt, I think I finished in about 45 minutes. The supervisor was incredulous. But she looked at the grill, and admitted she had never seen it so clean, and I clocked out.
The next time I cleaned the grill, I had mastered my technique, and I was done in 15 minutes. However, I had used up a good portion of the brick. About half to three quarters was ground off during the process. I figured, hey, that’s what they were for, right? Wrong.
The supervisor was angry this time. These bricks cost a dollar apiece! I couldn’t just use one up every night! Granted, minimum wage at the time was $3.15, so this seemed like a bigger deal then. But I just asked, would they rather pay me for 3 hours of work, and spend $10 on labor, or pay me $1 for 20 minutes, and ¢75 for the brick? Well, at least she could see the math, and left me alone about it.
I had to explain this a couple more times to other managers. However, I couldn’t manage to impart my technique to anyone else, so others continued to struggle with the job.
I have no idea why I’m thinking about this today, or why I feel compelled to write about it.
Postscript: Amazon listings are really, really stupid sometimes. This copy says the bricks cleans the grill without abrasives. LOLWUT? This brick is the most abrasive thing in the world. That’s why it works. There’s also a lifetime guarantee. I have no idea how someone could ever put that on one of these, and I can’t imagine trying to collect when you figure out that these things are expendable. Truly mystifying.