How to Wash Dishes My Way

[akirlu]

My Ways are not universal, as I was reminded over the weekend when my (lovely, fabulous) houseguests helped out with getting the kitchen ready to partay. At several points one of them would stop to ask, "I do this like so, is that okay?" Bless them. Of course, it's usually people who already know how to clean cast iron who check on how I prefer it washed...

I'm continually amazed at how many different ways there are to do the simple everyday things you don't normally think about at all. Like doing dishes. Simple, right? Yet there's a myriad ways to do even that simple thing, as I re-discover every time I hunt in vain for what I think of as basic tools in a strange kitchen wholly bereft of them. And re-discover again each time my sweetie re-organizes the sink and counter to wash dishes, because even the hubs and I don't wash dishes quite the same way.

So, clearly there are a lot of benighted people out there, who have never been shown the One True Way. Must fix.



Basic equipment:

heavy, rubber dishwashing gloves
tampico bristle dish brush
Scotch-Brite scrub sponge
dish soap
double sink
dish rack
dirty dishes
a cup of tea

Technique:

Overall, this process works from left to right, dirty to clean. Left-handed folks may wish to reverse the direction.

Dirty dishes should be stacked to the left side of the left-hand sink of the double sink (or, ideally, kept in a plastic dish pan that you can stow under the sink until you are ready to do dishes). Dish rack should be placed to the right of the right-hand sink. Plug the left side sink, place dishes into it until it is 1/4 to 1/2 full of dishes (no more), add a tiny dollop of dish soap, and fill one quarter- to halfway with hottest water available from your tap -- it should be steaming.

Let dishes stand for 5-10 minutes in the Very Hot Water. The heat of the water will loosen most dried or cooked-on food and make your job a ton easier. Sit down and sip your tea while you wait.

Once the dishes have soaked a while, don your gloves: the water should still be too hot for bare skin. Wet your scrub sponge and begin washing dishes. Use the scrub side first, and then the sponge side, on any items that have dried-on food still clinging to them. With pre-rinsed items, you can go straight to the sponge. As dishes are washed, place them in the right-side sink to drain, they will be rinsed collectively.

When the left sink is empty, or the right sink is awkwardly full, turn on a small trickle of the Very Hot Water, and rinse all the items from the right-side sink, placing them into the dish rack as they are rinsed. When the rinsing sink is empty, refill the washing sink with dishes, add hot water as necessary, and repeat until done. (N.B. - if you rinse your washed dishes *over* the washing sink, the rinse water warms the water in the wash sink and can be used in the next wash. This conserves a bit of water. If you only put a bit of water in the wash sink to begin with, you can do several rinses before overflowing the wash sink.)

When you rinse with steaming-hot water, you will also find that your dishes dry much faster and there is less hand drying to do.

But what about that tampico-bristle brush? Ah. That is for washing the cast iron pots.

How to Wash Cast Iron

Fill your cast iron pan half-full of water. (If you don't have a demand heater, and you're about to do dishes, fill from the hot tap, to clear the cooler water from your tap and pipes.) Place the filled cast iron pan on the stove and turn up the heat to high. Bring the water to a boil. With potholders, bring the pan back to your empty sink. Using the potholder to tip and rotate the pan, take the tampico brush and scrub pan interior thoroughly, using the boiling water to lubricate your efforts. Rinse with full-hot tap water. Return pan to stovetop very briefly to steam dry, then re-season with spray-on cooking oil.

(In general, boiling water in a dirty pot or pan will do a great deal of the scrubbing work for you. Even burnt-on food will generally boil right off. It's fabulous.)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do not, however, bring water to a boil to help clean the pot, wander off without telling anyone you've done so, and get engrossed in Christmas presents in the next room so that you don't notice anything until your daughter says, "Something smells hot," and your granddaughter leaps up to see what on earth is wrong with her kitchen.

Even if you don't have a daughter or a granddaughter, it's still a bad idea.

Grandma bought me a new dutch oven that Christmas. The stove surface, thankfully, was salvageable.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, a bad idea under all circumstances. As is putting a kettle on for tea in the kitchen, and then wandering off to the back of the apartment -- where you cannot hear the kettle -- and getting engrossed in something on the computer. The Revere kettle you melt all the phenolic bits off of may be your own.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

That's why I swear by electric auto shut off kettles these days. Jack used to put water on the stove and then be too far to hear the whistle. Fortunately, we never lost more than the bottom of the kettle to this habit.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I loved the auto-off kettles when I was in the UK. At the time, I couldn't find anything like them in the US. Now, however, it seems like electric kettles have become much more common, so perhaps its time to try again.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If I had to wash dishes by hand, that sounds more or less the way I'd do them, except we never set our water heater high enough to produce "steaming" water (for both energy and safety reasons) and--this is the kind of weird part--although I am also right-handed, I would always set up the wash-rinse-dry from right to left, not left to right as you have it. Strange.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that what temperature produces steam from tap water will vary depending on indoor temperature and humidity. Cool and humid rooms will, I believe, have the water steaming in the at rather lower temperatures than warm, dry rooms. Taking a shower in our house produces enough steam to condense on the living room windows.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I'm right handed and it's definitely start with dirty on the right hand side and end up with clean dishes in the drainer to the left. It was the same at my mother's house and she's right handed too. She just got the kitchen refitted, and she's still put the "draining board" on the left of the sinks.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily strange -- the Intuited Rule seems to be: The rinsed & drying dishes best go on the side of the sink next to the cupboards in which they'd be stored.

In my place, that's on the left as one faces the sink -- although, living alone, I've gotten away without putting dishes in cupboards, for decades, and in fact only vaguely recall precisely what's in the Dish Cupboards. Of course, given the limited counter-space (even including the pull-out breadboard), this means that the dishes have to be washed rather frequently -- usually before they start to smell too bad, so this might be considered a Feature.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Probably various features of the kitchen layout will affect the right-to-left versus left-to-right choice. In our kitchen, the left side of the sinks happens also to be more out-of-the-way to other kitchen tasks if dishes pile up there rather than getting washed right away.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

We're very clearly of the same tradition, with only minor differences, which I guess means I am a dangerous heretic.

I rinse dishes before stacking them to be washed, instead of soaking them afterwards.

I think a dish washing cloth works better than a sponge. The woven fibers can apply a lot of scrubbing force to a surface without marking it. It can fit in to small spaces such as champagne flutes. Also, it lasts a long time, and it can be washed with the towels.

I use a separate Scotch-Brite scrubbing pad, because they are awesome.

Don't have a double sink, so I wash in a plastic dish pan, and rinse over the pan or next to it.

Don't have a cast iron pan. All my pans are enameled. But long ago when I had a cast iron pan, that was how to clean it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I have never found a happy solution to getting a dishwashing cloth dry. If hung on the faucet to dry it looks messy to me. If hung on the sink edge to dry, it looks messy and gets re-wetted. So usually it ends up in a sour, never-drying ball shoved into a corner somewhere. Blech. I'm sure there must be a solution to this, but I haven't found it yet.

Meanwhile, sponges can be popped in the microwave, which is quicker than a wash cycle.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Hey, I completely forgot to re-season the pan, btw. I put it down and got distracted and....well.....

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's okay, I used it the very next day for a pork roast, so I re-seasoned it then. No worries.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I use a dishwasher. The few things that can't go in there get washed in the right-hand sink (diluted dishwashing soap poured on it, scrubbed by Giant equivalent of Dobie, rinsed) and put in the drainer in the left-hand sink.

Is there a chance that your left-hand sink has the garbage disposal? Mine is under the right-hand sink.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

We have neither garbage disposal nor dishwasher. We're unlikely to get a garbage disposal ever, and while I do want to put in a dishwasher, it's a bit of a multi-step process:

(1). Get electrician to remove the radiant heater by the living-room door, and put in an appliance outlet instead. Also move light switch to other side of door.

(2). Move refrigerator to the space by the living room door.

(3). Move the stove to where the refrigerator now sits.

(4). Alter our base cabinets to plumb for a dishwasher.

(5). Plumb for a dishwasher.

(6). Install dishwasher where stove used to be; install new countertop to cover dishwasher top.

So, as you can guess, we're going to have to find alternate means to get our dishes clean for a while yet.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yep, that sounds like it will take a while. And you compost? I can't do that here.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

We do compost, yes. Eventually I mean to set up my own compost pile in the back, but in the mean time, the city garbage collection includes a yard waste pickup, and that can include kitchen scraps, so I just keep an empty kitty litter bucket that I put the scraps into and then empty into the yard waste bin. As long as it gets composted somewhere, that makes me happy.

[shikzoid.livejournal.com]

I have a couple of compost bins you can have. Call me.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I washed dishes professionally for a while, in a place with no automatic equipment. Just me and some sinks. Wretched days, wretched days.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Particularly, I would guess, because the sort of place that has no dishwashing equipment whatever, also has no ergonomic amelioration for the torture of standing flat-footed on concrete floors for hours on end.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I don't really remember. I was more resilient then. I know I was bothered by my fingernails turning brown for the first couple of days, and I was even more bothered that the owner expected me to drop everything and make sandwiches when asked, which was a pain in my management of time, and it didn't seem sanitary. I finally quit amicably over that issue.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Both problems could, I would think, have been ameliorated or solved by wearing gloves. I really can't wash dishes without them, just because the excema on my hands will turn into a cracked, peeling, bleeding mess if subjected to all that soap, but even before I had that issue, I tended to wash dishes in water that was just too hot to put my hands into.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I would not have tolerated gloves on my hands for that many hours a day. It would be like wearing two scuba suits. No way.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, lucky thing you didn't truly pine for a career in dishwashing, then. Or SCUBA diving, come to think of it... :)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Argh. Even our church kitchens had automatic washers for the big dinners.

I need a dishwasher because my hands can't handle really hot water and (I just went and tried them on) the small gloves fit my fingers better, but bunch up at my wrist and let water in. The medium gloves go up my arms, but I have more than an inch of glove fingers beyond my fingers and I can't actually hold anything very well.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I'm a leftie and I wash left to right like that. Like Voidampersand, I rinse before putting them in the soapy water.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Even rinsed dishes, I prefer to soak in very hot water before washing. Belt and braces.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I find that drop marks vary greatly with the water, too -- they're much more common when you have to soften the water chemically. Of course the salts are added to the hot water; I never thought of rinsing them in the cold water. (Too easy a solution, I suppose.)

I have been known to put dish soap in contact with my cast iron frying pan, but it's mostly because I use one sponge for all dishes and it always has some residual soap in it. Unfortunately, I have also had guests try to scrape the black stuff off the bottom of my steel wok and use a copper pad on my expensive nonstick cookware (which wasn't bearing up that well to being with). Argh.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

For cast-iron: I generally avoid soap entirely, even when using what I think of as a generic scotch-brite pad, and re-season (or rust-prevent) by wiping a little olive oil on with a paper towel. Except for skillets or frying-pans (my mother, and paternal grandmother, came from different areas, so I absorbed both terms), which often just get wiped-out with a paper towel (on the general theory that frying something gets the pan hot enough to destroy any harmful bacteria or toxins).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I used to re-season with olive oil on a paper towel, and I have certainly cleaned cast iron with just a paper towel if there wasn't much to clean.

But since discovering Trader Joe's spray olive oil, I tend to use that as a protective coat instead, because it is quicker and easier to get a fine, even coat.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Look at kitchen.
Dispair.
Open magic cupboard.
Moan.
Remove clean things from magic cupboard and put away.
Cram everything dirty into magic cupboard.
Wait while wife removes things from magic cupboard that cannot be in magic cupboard.
Grumble.
Wash in hot water with sponge.
Put magic powder in magic cupboard.
Close door to magic cupboard and press magic "on" button.

The End.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Someday, we too will have the magic cupboard again, but there wasn't one that came with the house, and there isn't an easy and obvious place to pop one in without re-arranging the entire kitchen.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I washed dishes by hand for a year or two in our previous house, and then we had people cut out a cupboard or some drawers or something and had the magic installed. I had an additional time later to re-acquaint with the joy of handwashing while we accumulated money for more pixie dust when it lost its mana. Oh, and there were about ten days in 2003 when we had no power, so I had to heat water over a Coleman stove and wash dishes in it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I actually have the perfect place to put a dishwasher already. Unfortunately, at the moment there's a stove lurking in it, and I'm not willing to give that up. It's a bit like the old Bill Mauldin Joe and Willy cartoon: I got a target, but I gotta be patient.