I’ve received a lot of gifts in the past couple months from my wedding. Among them are a set of high quality knives from Henckels and a set of nonstick pans from Calphalon.
Both the knives and the pans have instructions that you are not to wash them in a dishwasher. Calphalon actually instructs not to wash with dishwasher detergent, while Henckels just says you must hand wash.
Is this something that I should be paying attention to? What’s the point of having nicer stuff if it means I have to do more work to maintain it? You’d think that high quality items would be more able to withstand the horrors of dishwashing soap than the cheap junk that used to fill my kitchen.
Your dishwasher is hell on earth for dirt and dishes alike. Automatic dishwasher detergent is very harsh and abrasive. The drying cycle uses high heat to drive all water from the items washed.
The high quality knives you have are tempered stainless steel, harsh abrasives and high temperature drying can damage the steel. Also, the clattering around that happens in the dishwasher will ruin the edge. You can’t take a fine steel edge and bash it against a fork 300 times during a wash cycle and have it be undamaged. A cheapo knife will survive OK, because the edge was never “fine” to begin with, and if it rusts or falls apart you buy another one.
Nonstick pans should never go into the dishwasher, expensive or cheap. The harsh abrasive will scratch the delicate nonstick surface, ruining it rapidly.
Knives and nonstick pans have no business being put through that, they are precision implements that require more careful handling than a dishwasher will provide.
Yes, you should be paying attention to this. The point is that you take better care of your nice stuff because it deserves the care and will last. Your former cheap shit could take a beating because it was cheap and you didn’t care about it.
We have had our Henckels 5-Star knives for about 6 years now. We have always washed them by hand and we hone them with a steel before each use. They are almost as good as the day we got them and we haven’t had to have them professionally sharpened yet.
We’ve had our Calaphon non-stick pans for 3 years and always washed by hand. They are all still as good as the day we bought them.
If you take care of your stuff, it will take care of you.
Calphalon and probably all other black anodized-aluminum cookware will be destroyed in the dishwasher. Trust me on this. The finish will be removed by the caustic dishwasher detergent and you will be extremely unhappy.
Also, some knives (especially older ones) can rust after a trip through the dishwasher, above and beyond edge damage from things bashing into them.
Ownign a very nice set of knifes, I have to say that it is really not any more work to maintain. Yes you have to rince them after use and dry them, but the cutting is so much better that you make up your time there, and really rincing them is really nothing, most people do 1/2 the rinsing anyway before they put it into the DW.
Your response has enormous visceral appeal, but I think you’re overstating your case. The temperature in a dishwasher isn’t likely to exceed 165 degrees F, which is meaningless re: the durability of tempered steel. Also, unless you have twin 300-horsepower Johnson inboard engines powering said dishwasher, I seriously doubt your utensils are clattering back and forth 300 times per cycle. Much more likely is that they are essentially stationary and a moderate jet of water is spraying them. I also doubt that dishwasher detergent is "very harsh and abrasive"and that “your dishwasher is hell on earth for dirt and dishes alike.”
That said, I agree with your characterization of knives as precision instruments. Keeping an edge on them is difficult. Better to rinse them off under running water.
You should be writing the scripts for infomercial.
How is it we can send men to the moon but we can’t design a non-stick cooking surface that can survive a dishwasher? I should be able to take that sucker outside and sandblast it if I feel that’s the best way to get it clean. It seems the more expensive and refined cooking implements get, the harder they are to clean. Copper, you have to polish it. Cast iron, you have to ‘season’ it.
Sorry, I’m ranting because I got a 20-piece Calphalon set for Christmas and my fiancée and I got into a fight about it. She wants me to return it and get something we can put in the dishwasher. At this point I’m inclined to return it and spend the money on takeout.
What’s the point of having nice stuff if you aren’t going to take care of it?
Another consideration is if they are high end Henckels, they have wood handles, which the dishwasher will trash.
I have the lower end ones with composite handles. I still would never put them in the evil machine.
But then I really hate dishwashers in general. They make the dishes smell funny, they etch the glasses, and they eat the knife edges. I’d as soon put my fine china in the washing machine.
Pots and pans in the dishwasher? Never, no matter the quality (or lack of). My dishwasher washes dishes (and stainless steelware, but not silverware; and glasses). Pots get washed by hand. My good knives have wood handles, so that’s also a no-no for the dishwasher.
And as for the Pampered Chef google ad…
My wife once let one of her friends hold one of the Pampered Chef showings in our house. They wanted me around because I love to cook and thought I might be a good endorsement. It was all I could do not to yell out what pieces of crap their equipment was.
So far I have been washing the knives by hand. Usually just a light rinse is all that’s needed anyways. After washing I dry them and hone them about 10 times before putting back into the knife block.
This seems OK with me for a few reasons: It’s not that much work to do. I need to hone them after every use anyway to keep them sharp. It’s a safety issue. Cleaning them by hand right away and not putting them into the machine means less sharp objects lying around the counter and that’s a good thing.
The pots and pans are more of a dissapointing story. I tend to agree with the others who doubt that the temperatures in the dishwasher to any harm. I think that here the detergent is the only problem.
If this assumption is correct, then why doesn’t somebody make a detergent that doesn’t harm non-stick surfaces? If regular dish soap is OK, then why can’t something like that be used in the dishwasher? A set of silverware that I got from crate and barrel states that you are not to use lemon scented soaps. Is it possible that there is a non-scented, not abrasive soap out there that could be used to safely wash things?
After a big meal where I have a half dozen pots and pans to clean, I’d like to continue what I’m doing now: Give them a quick wash in the sink with dish soap and hot water. Then put them in the dishwasher and run on light settings with no soap to rinse. This gets them plenty clean and has no dreaded dishwasher soap to ruin them.
An even more fundamental question: Why can’t we design a nonstick cooking surface that itself survives more than 12 months?
I find that the “golden age” of these slick surfaces lasts about 3 months, then slowly starts declining–regardless of price. If someone can point me to nonstick surfaces that stay slick after, say, 5 years of heavy use, I’d appreciate it.
Sorry, but it’s just great to actually have nice stuff. We only got about 3/4 of the china we were registered for. But, when we applied all of the gift certificates and return credits we were able to fill out the rest of the china for $50 out of pocket.
Now all we need is a dining room set to use them on and a china cabinet to put them in.
Acidic foods will deteriorate the seasoned coating. Your lovely non-stick cast iron will then hold onto everything like crazy glue. Plus, cast iron has pores. If not properly seasoned or if the seasoning deteriorates, it may begin to retain the flavor of foods cooked into it (cook fish with lemon sauce in cast iron, expect tomorrow morning’s scrambled eggs to taste fishy and lemony). Properly seasoned, cast iron is incredibly easy to clean and wonderfully non-stick.
