After I bath, I rinse off, with hand held showerhead before exiting the tub.
You don’t? What about the soapy scum that must be on you?
To be honest, I’ve never heard of anyone doing this.
You have now. I don’t often take baths but when I do, I rinse off at the end.
Do you rinse the self-righteousness off at the same time? Seems to me that you have rather a lather of that left. I doubt that your shower-head can rid you of that.
Before continuing, I should state that, beside frugality, I’m not defending any position in this thread - I’ve *described *what I understand to be the typical washing-up method of my generation, is all.
Anyway, I think if people are tasting detergent in food, it probably indicates not only that the dishes were inadequately rinsed, but also that they were air-dried, and that the amount of detergent used to wash them was vastly excessive.
It’s obviously not true to say that absolutely no trace of detergent remains on unrinsed dishes (although if we want to get technical, I’m pretty sure the same absolute isn’t true of dishes rinsed once either), however, I think dishes washed in a cleaning solution of appropriate strength, then towelled dry with a clean cotton cloth, are probably similarly free of residues as rinsed examples.
I’ve seen lots of Americans sticking soapy dishes in the rack, and never understood how anyone can stand to do that. Ugh. It’s disgusting. When it comes to cleansing, the water is just as important as the soap, if not more so.
Perhaps it’s an influence surviving from my college chemistry lab, when the instructor gave us a lecture about washing out test tubes, and stressing that a good thorough rinse was essential, because soap without sufficient water does not really leave it clean; in fact, he stressed that soap does not clean anything, it’s water that does the cleaning, and the soap is just there to assist the water.
Maggie is very much in the right. This describes exactly how I do it. Any other method would be inferior and therefore unthinkable for me.
There’s not even room to do that in my kitchen. I wash and stack/rack, then rinse by pouring water over the racked items on the draining board, then towel dry as I put it away.
- With rubber/silicon scraper, scrape very nearly all food residue off dishes into garbage.
- Place dishes into plastic dish pan.
- Run hot water into dish pan, with a small squirt of dishwashing liquid.
- While water is running, grab scrubby/sponge and start washing, plates first, then small plates, then bowls, etc., since that’s the order that fits best into the drying rack. Large utensils go with the dishes, flatware goes into a separate container.
- Air dry.
I used to let the dishpan fill first, then start, but this is faster and easier. Often I don’t even need to let the dishpan fill all the way. Unless somebody, especially my daughter, has been just putting dishes into the dishpan, there aren’t any food bits to speak of. Everything has been scraped off before the dishes get in there. If it’s a pan with nasty bits stuck on, it will be last, and if necessary, the water will be refreshed/reheated after the pan soaks a bit.
As for, ‘nobody will tell you’, you don’t know my family. Trust me, if they were regularly having digestive issues after eating at my house, they’d let me know. We’d have heard about it from my in-laws in rather crude and descriptive terms, I’m sure.
So, Elbows, with the newer method of getting it done, some of the plates do get washed under running water. If you want to come over for dinner and see if you can tell which ones, let me know when you’re free.
If you put 5ml of detergent in, say, 6 litres of water (both figures are about typical for me), and assuming, say, 1ml of that solution remains on the business side of the plate after draining, the plate has about 4/5ths of a microlitre of detergent on it (I’m actually going to halve that figure, as washing-up liquid is itself an aqueous solution)
If that plate is, say, 25cm in diameter and you allow the detergent to dry on it, there’s 8.5 * 10[sup]-7[/sup] millilitres of detergent per square cm.
Suppose you scoop up a spoonful of rice off that plate and that rice has fully absorbed all of the detergent residue from 10 square centimetres, you ingest 0.0000085 of a ml of detergent.
If you can taste that… well… I’m glad Homoeopathy worked out for you.
(someone check my maths, please)
Even less, if you rinse it!
I’ve never had a problem with tasting dish soap. But the real issue is exactly what Johanna said. The soap/detergent/liquid/whatever-you-want-to-call-it doesn’t clean the dishes and it’s not meant to. Its function is to latch on to the food residue/microbes/whatever. It’s the water that actually cleans by washing away the detergent. If you aren’t rinsing off the dish soap thoroughly, you aren’t cleaning the dishes.
Well, indeed - and I do, but I’m not convinced that the problem of soapy-tasting dishes is entirely caused by failure to rinse - IMO, it’s caused by failure to rinse after using excessive detergent.
I just don’t get these people who think that one drop of soap in the sink is not enough that you will taste it on whatever you take out of the sink that’s been soaking in that water. I don’t generally taste by dishes before I rinse them off, but I have smelled them, and you can definitely still smell the soap and still see the suds. If you can smell it, you can definitely taste it.
And I don’t get the two sinks thing, either. All it means is that you have to let the water out of your sink once before you start rinsing. Either way you’ll have to use running water to rinse, it’s just that you can do it while the other dishes are soaking if you have two sinks.
And if one drop of soap is too much, then it’s not exactly my fault–the detergent itself is too strong.
My mother in law is from Denmark. She doesn’t rinse her dishes. They have some little rhyme in Danish that justifies this, something about if it doesn’t come off in the sink it comes off on the dish towel. Only it rhymes or is a tounge twister or something in Danish. I was horrified when she did dishes at my house the first time. My son was still very young, and although I didn’t bother rinsing the adult dishes I rinsed all his baby bowls and spoons after she finished.
She used the “well the water is so nice and hot, why would you need to rinse?” defense that I have seen up thread. I did dishes by hand at my parents place for most of my life, and still do a majority of my dishes by hand. I always rinse, if I have one sink or two. If I have one sink I usually get a dish pan or a large bowl to contain the soapy water.
Dishtowels are a bit gross too. If not changed frequently they absorb crap and possibly sit around damp if not set out to dry properly, making a nice inviting microbial habitat. I firmly believe a drying rack, in combination with rinses with very hot water, is the only rational method for a household whose mentality has moved on from the 19th century.
What illnesses do you think the Brits are getting that you are all narrowly avoiding thanks to your scrupulous rising techniques?
Justifications, and rationalizations that just reinforce, ‘It’s how we’ve always done it!’, or ‘It’s how me Mum does it!’, notwithstanding, these are the facts, as I see them.
You eat off the dishes, why wouldn’t you rinse? It baffles!
And why is it so impossible to believe that a person who has not experienced a steady, if tiny, intake of dishsoap, should experience intestinal upset, when exposed to it? How is that not self evident? Again baffling.
(Thanks anyway, I think I’ll decline the invitation, I think I’m, er, uh, busy that day!:D)
n.m.
Nonsense! You can buy plastic dish bins to wash your dishes in – that’s what I do. I have a double sink, but even when I didn’t, I never had a problem.
(I’d love to have a dishwasher, but unfortunately, there isn’t any room in our kitchen)