Sticky Yellow Grease

As part of Chinese New Year tradition, house-cleaning was on the menu.

In the past I've mentioned the kitchen horror-show resulting from my mother-in-law's incessant frying with canola oil, and you know that the sticky yellow grease coating the hood fans, main kitchen fan, walls and cupboard doors is quite difficult to remove. With that in mind I picked up a bottle of Easy-Off Bang degreaser (marketed in North America as Bam, not sure why it's different here, to my knowledge "bam" is not a dirty word in Cantonese), in the hope it would make the job, well, easier.

But I did not know just how persistent that yellow grease can be, which makes me glad I wore rubber gloves when I attacked the mess, or I'd be typing this with my elbows.

Now the product claims all you have to do is spritz, let sit, and then simply wipe off the goop, so the first step was to remove the fans and their cowlings, take them outside and coat them with the degreaser. The next step was to tackle the kitchen surfaces. But instead of liquefying the grease, the product merely sat on top of the goop. Paper towels did not have the requisite strength to make a dent, so I pulled out the only tool that could handle the work: steel wool.

Did I mention how persistent the grease is? No sooner had I removed it from a surface than it stuck to the gloves, which in turn required more degreaser. And here's the thing: even after removing the gunk some surfaces still felt tacky to the touch and thus had to be degreased a second time. I don't know what happens chemically when my mother-in-law fries food, but I suspect it has something to do with nano-technology and bonding at the molecular level. For all I know, she's invented a new super-adhesive.

After a couple of hours working up a sweat, I went outside to see how well the degreaser had worked on the fans. The answer is: hardly at all. There were a couple of disgusting globs of yellow muck on the ground, but otherwise the crud was mostly still in place. So once again I put the steel wool to work, and with a few more coatings of degreaser and some, er, elbow grease, the glop came off. Oddly enough the plastic surfaces came away completely clean, while the metal parts proved much harder to tackle, but eventually I finished the job.

So while the Easy-Off proved to be anything but, I was still glad I had it, because without it I'd still be in the kitchen.

Probably stuck to the wall.

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