Well, technically yes. The question is, do you want to?
Granite and quartz worktops are incredibly tough and durable. This makes them scratch resistant. They can easily take the daily wear and tear of dropped rolling pins and spilt milk with gleaming resilience.
But they are scratch resistant, not scratch proof. Just like everything else, they can be damaged, it’s just more difficult to do so in comparison to a material such as marble.
Using your granite countertop as a chopping board will probably damage your knives more than your worktop
A chopping board is always preferable to chopping straight onto your worktop. This is in part for the safety of your surfaces, of course, but much more so for the safety of your knives. The best knives on the market will not survive repetitive cutting on a granite or quartz surface. The blades would be repeatedly dulled and eventually they would simply give up the ghost. Buying new knives on a monthly basis will probably make you cry more than the onions you’re chopping with them.
That is because of the resilience of quartz and granite, and part of what makes them such superb materials for worktops. Where they are refuting damage from the knives they are rebounding it right back onto your precious knife blades.
Don’t be discouraged by this, quartz and granite offer lots of flexibility.
With our worktops you can tailor them to your kitchen needs. A great example of this is drainage grooves in your counter. These can be cut in clean, straight lines or curved to fit the shape of your perfect kitchen. They’re made for you. Worktops can be made to slant ever so slightly toward an in-built sink so that you don’t have to put up with standing water. For example take our Absolute Black Granite Worktop: building the grooves into the worktop rather than fitting a sink and draining board in, will fit the look of a modern, fashionable kitchen interior.
William Morris said that you should have “nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. Well, why not have both?
Our drainage grooves live up to a standard of looking sleek and stylish whilst remaining completely practical. The same can be said of our heat protection. Though our granite and quartz surfaces are resilient to bumps, scrapes and most heat, they do not love to have hot pans sat on them for long periods of times. To remedy this you can purchase hot rods. These are metal sticks that are heatproof, waterproof and detergent-proof. They keep pans from touching the worktop surfaces directly helping to avoid any risk of heat damage.
Options consist of self-adhesive hot rods if you have one place in mind for resting hot pans, or alternatively you may want them to be mobile so that you can shift them about your kitchen at leisure. The plus side to these hot rods is that they tend to look smart and modern, perhaps not fitting entirely to William Morris’s aesthetic but we’re sure he’d approve.
So, like every worktop, your best option is a chopping board, but unlike every worktop, granite and quartz will stand tough to any ill-aimed chopping, dropping, slicing and dicing. Unfortunately we can’t say the same for your fingers.
