It just occurred to me; no matter how hard I scrub, I’m not really confident that the dishes that have been swimming in tepid soapy water and scrubbed with a brush I’ve been using for years are really, truly, as clean as dishes that come out of a dishwasher. Is there something bacteria-killing but safe that I could wipe them down before I put them away? I’m imagining something like that blue barbicide they use in barber shops, but preferably something that won’t poison me.
If you’re not getting sick then what’s the problem? Soak your scrubbing brush in bleach to kill off any nasties between uses and rinse it well before using it, but don’t go adding chemicals to the plates you eat off to make them “cleaner”. If you’re really paranoid, you could try putting them in boiling water to sterilise them.
Get some rubber washing-up gloves - this will enable you to use much hotter water without hurting your hands.
If you have a double bowl, fill one side with hot, soapy water and the other with just hot water - rinse the worst of the food off the plates before you even start (i.e. while you’re clearing the table), then scrub them in the soapy side, rinse in the clear side and stack.
Also: remember - in normal circumstances, it’s food you’re washing off the dinnerware - not pure chunks of evil bacteria.
I don’t have a dishwasher, and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never gotten sick from bacteria on dishes/utensils. The biggest factor is how long you let things sit before washing. Obviously, if there’s stuff growing on your dishes they need more attention that if they were washed right after use. Use common sense and don’t worry about it.
You can boil them in bleach, soak them in alcohol and run them through an autoclave and they’ll still be covered with germs by the time you’re ready to eat off them again.
You only need to scrub to remove dried on food particles; microbes do not have tiny little dish-claws with which to hang on to dishes.
Use hot, not tepid, water for washing and rinsing, as recommended by others. The dishes dry faster, too.
Buy a new brush occasionally, and rinse it with nice HOT water when you’re done.
You don’t need to kill the bacteria, just rinse it off; hot water and oxygen kill the nastiest bugs.
You do have an immune system, don’t you? And a nice acidic stomach? And plenty of oxygen in your tissues?
Dishwashers are nothing but a convenient place to store used dishes. They are a quite inconvenient and time-consuming way to wash dishes for families smaller than six.
Your grandmothers probably didn’t have dishwashers, and your parents survived and thrived. Read Cold Comfort Farm. And, please, get a new dish brush.
Yeah really dude - why are you using an old dish brush? I buy a pack of 4 sponges for under $2, make sure my washing sponge dries out properly in the dish drainer (it never dries if you just leave it in the bottom of the sink, even if the sink is dry) and I get a fresh sponge out every 2 weeks or so.
I cook 90% of the meals for this family of two, and by “cook” I mean “make from scratch.”
We run the dishwasher at least once a day, and sometimes twice a day. It’s VERY convenient and not nearly as time-consuming as doing the dishes by hand.
If I could fit two dishwashers in my kitchen, I would. I love my dishwasher.
What kind of dishwasher do you have and what kind of cooking do you do that you can fill it twice in one day for two people?
One of the reason I stopped using mine was that it took at least two days to fill it, and leaving the dishes sitting in a nice, warm, bug friendly environment for that long is … is unpleasant to me.
Another reason is that standing at the sink is easier on my back than bending over to load and unload the dishwasher. (The only time I have enough dishes to make the dishwasher worth the trouble is when I have guests, and then I use my late mother’s good china, which I insist on hand-washing …)
Dishwashers are also a wonderful (and specialist approved!!) way to sterilize baby bottles and pediatric nebulizer equipment. The latter, if I didn’t have a dishwasher, would have me doing a five step process to clean and sterilize all the bleeping tubing every time the kid has to use it. I love my dishwasher with a deep and abiding devotion.
But yeah, if there’s no kid in the house with an underlying medical issue and paranoid doctors, hot water and soap are just fine. (But rinse the sponge or cloth in cold water when you’re done. It won’t stink that way.)
If you really wanted to be picky, you could always do a three step hand washing of hot soapy water, followed by a rinse and then a dip in a bleach solution. This is how I’ve seen it done in Mexico when the water supply was questionable, and I think some health codes require it if a restaurant doesn’t have a sanitizer.
That is the standard pretty much anywhere for manual dishwashing.
Wash in hot soapy water
Rinse in hot clear water
Sanitize by soaking in tepid (not hot) water with bleach at the rate of 1/3 cup of chlorine bleach per 5 gallons water for 30 seconds
Air dry
The rinse really does need to be in clean water - if you can’t see the bottom of the sink, it’s not clean.
The sanitize really must not be hot - hot water will only serve to boil off the chlorine and diminish its effectiveness.
It’s got to be chlorine bleach - oxygen or “color-safe” bleach won’t work.
We have a slimline (45cm) Whirlpool dishwasher which is supposedly a 9 or 10 place setting. It’s not at all difficult to fill it up after cooking a meal for two - cutlery, glasses, plates, pans, oven dishes, stirrers, chopping boards, cooking knives, bowl+attachments for the Kenwood chef, it takes up a fair amount of volume. If we use the juicer attachment then some stuff usually has to sit on the worktop to wait for the next load. We generally only run it once a day because we only make one meal a day, but at weekends it gets a real workout, what with baking + cooking a weeks worth of frozen lunches.
As for washing up - people get paranoid about this IMO. Get a new brush every few weeks, make sure the water is painfully hot and change it whenever it gets too murky. If the dishes are squeaky clean and steaming hot when they come out, then it doesn’t really matter how long they have been sat about or what they had on them. I think bleach, disinfectant and so on are overkill unless you have been venturing into the further reaches of grossness for some reason, or someone in your house is immunocompromised.
[my bolding]
Ewwwww. You are weak in the ways of washing up.
This, this, this. A dip rinse with the powerful surfactants in today’s dishwashing liquids is really inadequate. I’d also wager that if you’re going to get sick from anything left on your dishes, it’s going to be leftover dish liquid residue, not old food/bacteria. Dried on suds can cause diarrhea.
Also be sure that you’re washing in proper order: before filling your sink, do a separate hot water rinse of cutting boards and knives, especially if you’ve cut raw meat. Then fill the sink with hot, soapy (but not too soapy, read the directions) water, and wash glasses first, then silverware followed by dishes, then serving bowls and dishes, next mixing bowls and utensils, cooking utensils and finally pots and pans. You may need to refill your sink with fresh water and soap before you get to the pans.
I have a KitchenAid dishwasher. It’s not a mini size, but it’s not oversize either.
Standard daily cooking fills it up once a day. Think a pan or two for breakfast (eggs or oatmeal), plus plates and silverware and coffee cups. Lunch is another couple of plates or bowls, maybe a pan, depending on what we make. Or maybe plastic storage bowls from the fridge because we’re heating up leftovers.
The big part is dinner. At least another couple of pans, more if I’m doing something more involved. And more plates, silverware, and glasses.
If it’s not full after dinner, it’ll be full in the morning after breakfast.
The days I run it twice is when I’m doing more involved cooking or baking. Making soup for the freezer, for example, and then making dinner. Big pots/pans/mixing bowls take up a lot of room, and it doesn’t take many of them to fill up the dishwasher.
Even if I didn’t run it once a day, I’d still have it. I hate having dirty dishes piling up in the sink, and I hate doing dishes by hand. I would never live without a dishwasher unless, say, the apocalypse came and it was impossible.
Yesterday was a good example of a two-load day. The dishwasher was about half full in the morning. Made a quiche for breakfast, and around noonish put some flank steak in to marinate. Between those two things, hmm, that’s one bowl for the egg/milk mix for the quiche, a cutting board to cut stuff up, a pan to blanch the asparagus in, a knife, a cheese grater, the quiche pan. The beef was two cutting boards (one for beef, one for the onion for the marinade), a bowl for the beef to go in, another bowl in which to whisk together all the marinade ingredients. I don’t count knives because they don’t get put in the dishwasher. By that time, the dishwasher was full and then some.
Later that day we made salads, sauteed some scallops, made a sauce for the scallops, a salad, and chocolate souffle for dessert. Dishwasher was emptied and full again during that whole thing.
Granted, it was Valentine’s Day, so that was not exactly normal. But I’m also into cooking and have a vested interest in eating unprocessed, healthy food, so it’s not a once-a-year thing that I cook that much or more in a day.
Important distinction - you’re merely sanitizing (aka disinfection), which is removing harmful microbes enough such that they’re down to a safe level. True sterilization is more or less beyond the reach of anything outside of a lab.
