So. . . I shouldn’t bother with extremely hot, hand scalding water while hand washing my dishes. And what I have been doing is actually the best. Hand washing them, putting them in the broken dishwasher and drying them in the ‘heat dry’ cycle.
You forgot to amortize the kitchen itself … say $5,000 remodel every 20 years works out to 68¢ per day … if the kitchen is 10% of floor area, the roofing (at $10,000 per 30 years) is then 9¢ per day … similarly property taxes at 20¢ per day … mortgage interest … public school bonds … the list goes on …
No dishwasher at my house! I wash our dishes in hot water - but not so hot I can’t put my hands in it and then rinse them off with cold water. I leave them in the drainer and put them away when they’ve dried. We’ve all survived using this method.
I’m appalled that so many people with no knowledge of the subject are chiming in with opinions and mis-information as if this was IMHO. mmmiiikkkeee and Ruken appear to know what they are talking about, so thank you.
I’m a ServSafe certified Chef, and food safety is a major part of my job. I want to make a few points about things I’ve read in this thread.
First, the OP. mmmiiikkkeee answered the question in his excellent post. Hot water sanitization is not possible with hand washing. Bacteria do in fact grow rapidly at the temperatures that burn our hands. Its not an option. Heat-only sanitizing commercial dish machines require temperatures of 180, (and are rarely used anymore). Simply put, if you hand-wash at home, you WILL be leaving bacteria on the surface of the dishes. If you are concerned about this, you can use a chemical sanitizer. Chlorine bleach, at a concentration of 100 ppm, will sanitize your dishes to commercial standards in 30 seconds with lukewarm water. Wash, Rinse, Sanitize is the standard hand-washing method approved by the FDA.
Second, Chimera, Commercial kitchens sanitize, not sterilize. And we don’t do it to prevent the spread of “communicable diseases brought in by their patrons.” We do it to prevent the spread of foodbourne illness. There are a handful of microbes that we are primarily concerned with, such as Salmonella, E. Coli, Listeria, and Noro Virus. Standards are set to eliminate the majority of these threats. They can come from many sources, including employees, contaminated food, undercooked or mis-handled food, and, relevant to this discussion, improperly sanitized equipment. We can never kill every pathogen, so our best chance at preventing foodbourne illness is to eliminate as many chances for those pathogens to grow to dangerous levels. This is why we sanitize our plates, not to get the dishes back to the kitchen quickly, as another poster thought, but to eliminate as many chances at contamination as possible.
jjakucyk, your knowledge of bacterial death is very, very wrong. If you wipe a counter off with a contaminated towel, and let it dry, the bacteria will not all die. The bacteria there will not grow, and some will die, but the surface will remain contaminated until properly sanitized. There are a lot of variables to consider if the bacteria will be at dangerous enough levels to get someone sick. But its there, it doesn’t just dry out and die.
Finally, as a chef running two professional kitchens, I fear the ignorance of my patrons who don’t understand the basics of food safety. Anytime someone thinks they have food poisoning, they often blame the last restaurant they ate at, but ignore their poor food handling practices at home. Restaurants are inspected regularly, are run by qualified and certified chefs, and many states have requirements for regular staff training. People at home hand wash their dishes and know nothing about sanitation. They put their leftovers in the fridge, still hot and sealed in tupperware. They handle raw meats and ready-to-eat foods at the same time. And, as is evident from most of the posts in this thread, they think that their methods are perfectly safe. Then I get that phone call in the morning, “I ate at your restaurant for dinner yesterday, and I got food poisoning. I was throwing up all night!” I wonder how that person washes their dishes.
Aside from every McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Subway, Chipotle (especially Chipotle!), Quiznos, Penn Station, Arby’s, etc and any other place I can think of that doesn’t have “certified chefs” on hand. Middling managers of these places enforce cleanliness at their whims, and many Americans eat there every day. I’m not saying right or wrong, but it’s true.
This from a man in a long line of “certified chefs”. What a chef maintains in his place versus what the masses eat on the daily isn’t remotely close. Not even close.
Another good reason for using nice hot water is that the dishes dry better. If you use cold water, it is hard to get them properly dry so you end up with more smears.
So “very very wrong” means “kind of sort of wrong”, gotcha.
Amblydoper, I think most home dishwashers (the machine, not the people) have a “sani-cycle”, often optional, that heats the dishes enough to kill most bacteria. I think it’s usually less hot but longer than the sanitation cycle in a commercial machine.
Yes, but this thread is specifically about hand washing. I mentioned that only to point out what temperature is needed when not using a chemical sanitizer.
Amblydoper makes a great point about the difference between sanitizing and sterilizing … canning corn is something of an extreme, but it illustrates my point the best … inside a pressure canner we have higher than atmospheric pressure which in turn causes the boiling point of water to increase … let’s call it 225ºF (110ºC) … typical recommendation is to cook for and hour and a half … only then is the corn sterilized and safe to seal up …
That’s what kills all the bacteria and the spores … so compare to hand washing dishes at 140ºF for ten minutes or a dishwasher at 180ºF for five minutes … this only reduces the bacteria levels down to the point the human immune system can function properly …
YMMV by state or county. Arizona requires certification for any manager in a facility handling food for the public. DesertRoomie was the snackbar lead at a theater and assistant manager at a corporate gas station cum convenience store, and had to take a ServSafe course once a year at both places. They were inspected at least once a quarter about their food storage and handling and corporate would be most unhappy if the location couldn’t serve food for a while.
At Burning Man water, hot or cold, is scarce. I belong to a large camp of 250 or so people that serves three meals a day. With that number we use disposable plates and eating utensils so only have to worry about the pots and cooking tools to wash.
We heat a gallon of water to boiling and add it to about three more gallons in the sink to make water warm enough to melt grease, as others have mentioned, and add detergent. From there they went to a cold rinse and then let air dry on a rack.
A few years ago the Nevada Health department took an interest in the event and decreed that any camp that cooked a meal for fifty or more for camp members, or gifted food to non-camp members (a common happening) had to pay fifty bucks for a permit and would be inspected, typically a surprise visit once during the event.
We’d had a food poisoning scare in the camp a few years ago so we were careful. The first year we passed but the inspection team said they’d really like to see a sanitizer step added. The next year we set the pots aside after the rinse, sanitized them with a dunk in an iodine solution (including test strips to make sure it was powerful enough) and another rinse. The inspectors were impressed but said that diluted bleach would suffice so that’s what we’ve used since then.
Have you worked at any of those? Just curious. Regardless if they are chefs or not, they will have to go through the related training as I had to myself when I was not a certified chef, and I forgot the term, but a food handler. Someone who knows more will be able to answer more accurately, but chain restaurants use kits. And it’s not unusual for the food to be cooked and then packaged and the final destination reheats. You can buy stuff like this at places like your local supermarket or “big box” food place with those “ready-to-eat” meals where all you have to do is reheat.
Could a place like McDonalds be actually cracking fresh eggs for the egg McMuffins I love so much? Sure, but, I doubt it. As long as it’s safe I’m OK with it. I can always cook it for myself at home or go to another place.
I’ve found that vinegar breaks up grease just as effectively as scalding hot water. When I’m handwashing dishes it’s usually moderately hot water with a spray bottle full of vinegar. Vinegar is also excellent for melted cheese.
As has been said many times in this thread, hot water in hand-washing dshes is not for killing bacteria, but to aid in the removal of bacterial growth media (food). Water with a higher temperature has, by definition, higher average kinetic energy per molecule, and thus able to dislodge baked-on goop more easily. It takes a looooong time to draw hot water to our kitchen, so I tend to only do so when there’s stuff I need to soak (or it’s time to run the dishwasher), and the heat of the water has a long time to interact with the food residue. For most hand dishwashing, I simply use the room temperature water the faucet provides and it’s sufficient (if not, draw hot water, let it soak). The temperature and thus kinetic energy of the molecules of the water while scrubbing with a sponge or scouring pad is simply not relevant compared to the mechanical action of scrubbing.