Thanks for the tips! Yeah, not really too worried about it, but just had a feeling I wasn’t doing a bang-up job. I think the biggest takeaway is that I’ll start using gloves, because I’m always adding lukewarm water for my hands’ sake.
Do brushes (the kind with plastic bristles, nothing absorbent) really need to be replaced as often as sponges?
I imagine if you soaked the brushes in a bleach solution, that would be sufficient to sanitize it. The problem with sponges (if you don’t microwave them every other day) is that the bacteria is very adept at hiding in all the tiny nooks and crannies.
you can also clean a sponge by giving it a bleach bath every couple days, I keep a bottle of bleach water (its about a cap full of bleach in a quart of water) on hand to spray down the counters after working with raw meat and it works great on the sponge as well, just wring it out really good, give it a few squirts of bleach water and then wring/rinse it out and let it dry.
you dont want to put it away full of bleach water because the bleach will kill your sponge over time.
If you don’t have a sealed and completely sterile cabinet, what on earth are you worrying about perfectly clean dishes for? An immune system that is never used is not any good.
The build up in the cabinets is far worse than the dishes. Do you sanitize your cabinets daily?
What everybody said about how to hand wash is more than enough.
X2 on replacing and keeping clean and dry you wash cloths, sponges, brushes…
YMMV
Yes. 'Swhat I meant. Thanks for clarifying.
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Breakfast: One bowl, one spoon; two mugs; one knife, optional
Lunch: Option - one/two plastic container with lid or one/two disposable ziplock bag
Dinner: One pan, one bowl, two knives (optional) for cooking; two plates; two glasses; varied utensils; one container for marinating, optional
Just not worth the bending over.
When I prep food for the week or do serious cooking, I wash as I go.
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One thing I’m kind of surprised that no one has yet mentioned: If you’re concerned about minimizing bacteria, don’t wash dishes in the kitchen sink itself – use a wash basin of some sort. Kitchen sinks tend to be among the germiest places in the house outside the toilet bowl. (Of course, there are lots and lots of people who wash their dishes in the kitchen sink and are just fine.)
Your list isn’t all that different than my list. I think it’s worth the bending over. And I can’t imagine washing as I go while cooking - what’s the point, when you have a dishwasher?
What’s the difference between washing a sink basin and washing a wash basin? I routinely scrub my sink, and when using it for beermaking purposes, it gets sanitized completely. I’m not a some weirdo obsessive-compulsive, as far as I know.
As for the dishwasher, even a simple dinner for two can fill ours up. Pots and pans are bulky, and take the space that dinner ware for 12 people would otherwise occupy.
My wife, on the other hand, hates using the dishwasher. She doesn’t see the point in “wasting” is for just a few dishes. I think her point is, she can wash a few dishes and put them away quicker than the dishwasher can, because even for a few dishes, a dishwasher is much more energy efficient and uses less water than hand washing.
Here’s the first thing. Throw out the sponges, unless you use them only once. It really isn’t possible to get a sponge anywhere near free of germs. Use wash cloths instead, because they can be completely dried. Even so, give the cloth a sniff before each use. Once it begins to smell funky, throw it out and start a new one.
Killing germs on dishes, and on hands, are another two categories, and I’ll get to them.
If you’d like to disinfect your sink, bleach works fine, but you don’t need to use it straight. One part bleach to twenty parts water will kill everything, including HIV and tuberculosis. If you want hospital-grade overkill, one part bleach to ten parts water is absolutely the strongest you will ever need. If you use more bleach that that, you’re only wasting bleach, and you’ll make your eyes and nose hurt. (There’s no physical damage from short-term bleach fumes exposure, but your nose and eyes will sting at high concentrations.)
Bleach, like any disinfectact, takes time to work. Once you’ve wiped your sink and cutting board with bleach, go do something else for at least 10 minutes, then rinse.
Hand-washing is very important in avoidance of passing diseases around. It’s not as complicated as some might think. All soap is germicidal!
In many nursing schools, a lab experiment is performed to show the importance of hand-washing and the unimportance of germicidal soaps. Before hand-washing, test swabs are taken of the whole group’s hands. Half the students wash with plain soap, and the rest wash with germicidal soap.
Before washing, the hands were a menagerie of bacteria and viruses. After washing in warm water, the plain soap washers and the germicidal washers had identical bacterial counts on their hands.
Time counts. Wash long enough to mentally sing Happy Birthday twice.
Whatever you do, rinse in cold water, that’s better for removing all the soap residue.
I wash both myself and my dishes with a Japanese nylon scrub cloth that I get locally. It is NOT the candy-ass nylon scrub cloth ripoffs you can get at 99 Cent stores and the like, or pretty much any of the nylon scrub cloth things you see at the drug store. The vast majority of those products are too soft, lame and useless. No, what you have to get is the real deal made in Japan type - it has a genuinely “scrubby” surface that’s fantastic for your skin AND your dishes. And the really great thing is that they are incredibly durable and they dry very easily, they do not hold cooties iike washcloths and sponges, both of which gross me out. You can also do what I do for the kitchen and soak them in Clorox. ( About once a week or every other week I soak my kitchen brushes and clothes in Clorox, and swab down all my counters and dishrack and everything. I also do this whenever I work with raw chicken, I recently had a very bad experience just briefly touching a little chicken juice then eating something with the same hand half an hour later. It’s made me ultra-paranoid.)
What I generally do is buy one for the kitchen and cut it in half.
Oh, and another great thing is the way they lather! Wow! I don’t know what it is about them, but nothing in the world works up a later like these scrub cloths.
I did a google and got some Ebay links that look like the right thing, but I can’t swear:
“salux” looks very much like what I mean.
And this is new to me, i’m going to try it…seems even better for dishes, it says it’s thicker than the others and “hard” type, for men, doncha know.
I can’t say enough good things about these cloths, I urge everyone to try them out for both personal bathing and dishcleaning, you will never go back to sponges and washclothes, I promise you. (And no, I’m not selling them, I just love them and have loved them since my mother found them in Little Tokyo in the 1970’s.)
And remember: the cloths I’m talking about are very noticeably “scratchy” on the surface. If you get something that looks right, but the texture doesn’t seem scratchy, especially wet, you got a bad ripoff product. The ones I mean are almost never seen in regular stores, the only place I’ve bought them is Whole Foods and Little Tokyo.
Oh, and as long as I’m recommending cleaning stuff, the best scrubber that I’ve ever used is another throwback to my childhood: [http://www.acehardwaresuperstore.com/chore-boy-golden-fleece-scouring-cloths-p-5554.html?ref=42"]Chore Boy Golden Fleece](http://www.acehardwaresuperstore.com/chore-boy-golden-fleece-scouring-cloths-p-5554.html?ref=42) scrub cloths. I can’t find them in LA anymore, but I see they are available all over online. Absolutely top drawer, superior to any metal scrubber, green scrubber, brush…and jsut like the Japanese clothes, they are extremely durable.
One last thing about both things: because of their design, they do not “hold” food and grease the way I’ve noticed brushes or other kinds of scrubbing cloths tend to. Like SOS pads? One pot and you are done, you can never get the pad clean! Blech.
For real people, who don’t live in boy-in-the-bubble surgical conditions, the very air we live in is a swirling miasma of bacteria and viruses. It’s okay, though. We are immune to almost all of it. Our skin, our noses, and our stomachs kill off almost all of those microbes before they can hurt us. The ones that get past our first defenses are fought off by our white blood cells and chemicals we make, called antibodies. (Antibiotics are nothing more than artificial copies of our antibodies.)
Sooner or later, we must strike a balance between attempts at a sterile environment and real life.
We wash our dishes in a hot (120° to 130° F) water and detergent solution. The combination of the heat and the alkaline detergent is deadly to bacteria. However, the instant our dishes have the rinse-water dried off, the microbes in the air will settle on them. It’s unreasonable to expect any better than that.
Our bodies are not helpless. We are extremely well-equipped to fight off disease and infection. Between our powerful natural defenses and some common-sense precautions, we are unlikely to get sick.
It’s tempting to go all Adrian Monk in our caution, but that path won’t bring us harmony. Seek a balance.
Still, changing out the dish cloth occasionally is a good idea.
Reminding me of the time I was reeeaaaal smart and figured that the wooden salad forks we use must be infested with bacteria from getting soaking wet so often. Outside, they dry up, but inside - I was convinced that I needed to give them a real good cleaning. So, being a member of the more naive of the Teeming Masses, I put the fork in the wave and nuked it for a few minutes. When I smelled the smoke, I returned to the kitchen to see how my biological acumen had turned the salad fork into a toasted ex-salad fork. :smack: If you nuke your sponge, watch it at all times. You know, a good way to clean a dish sponge is to put it in the dishwasher. xo, C.
You can safely nuke sponges and washcloths by sticking them in a big bowl of water and then nuking. They come out sans mustiness. Magic!
Actually, it’s just my husband and I now, and we use our dishwasher daily too. Between the glasses, the coffee mugs, the bowls, etc. etc. etc. it gets run every night (or if it’s a slow day, the next morning when coffee is done.) But even though I have it, I also wash (well rinse really good) as I’m cooking too - my damn kitchen is so small I HAVE to! If I don’t put the dirty stuff in the dishwasher, I won’t have room to actually cook anything.