As an apartment dweller without a dishwasher, I’ve hand-washed a lot of dishes over the years.
While I’ve gotten used to it, the bane of my dishwashing existence is the stinky soap-scum stain that forms on my laminate countertop where I leave the dishes to dry.
I’ve tried a variety of dish-drying setups—moisture-absorbing pads, rubber bar mats, wire racks—to no avail. The scummy spot inevitably returns with the next round of dishes. Plus, these other drying doodads always end up caked with decomposing food and mold, and they're difficult to clean. (If you’ve ever tried to clean a bar mat, you know how hard it is.)
But when I started working at America’s Test Kitchen, it dawned on me that my colleagues probably had a solution to my woes. I dug in (rather maniacally) to their dish drying rack review and ordered the giant version of their top dish rack: the simplehuman Steel Frame Dishrack.