For many, many years there has been an ongoing debate on these boards, and perhaps in society as a whole, regarding whether one does/should/must rinse dishes after they’ve been soaped and scrubbed.
Given what we’re learning about what it takes to wash our hands properly, I think it’s pretty clear that its the pro-rinse group that is the correct one.
Basically, one of, if not the, principle functions of soap is to grab onto microbes and make the surface slippery so they can be easily removed. If you’re not rinsing, then you’re leaving the microbes there.
And what applies to the hands, logically applies to dishes.
I never even understood the argument. Nobody soaps up their hands and dries them- we all rinse. Nobody would just soap up their body and towel off straight away. Nobody would just soap up their car and drive off or dry it right away. Dishwashers have a rinse cycle. Washing machines have a rinse cycle. Automatic car washes have a rinse cycle.
So who in their right mind would just soap up dishes and then dry them with the soap still on them? Out of all the examples of using soap/detergent, not rinsing dishes seems like the most perplexingly idiotic. You’re using the soap/detergent to basically emulsify grease and oil and allow the water to remove the soil/crud. All of which is in suspension in the soapy water. So you rinse that off with clean water. QED.
Not rinsing is half-assing it, and probably makes your food taste nasty.
I was under the impression the Brits would scrub a dish clean, rinse it in soapy water, then wipe it dry with a towel. That sounds fairly sufficient for cleaning and not leaving a soap taste, although I don’t like a soapy taste either and prefer rinsing in clean water.
It’s not really about whether the food will taste like soap. I expect that in most cases, there won’t be any noticeable taste.
But it’s just like wiping your bottom with toilet paper–until you’ve washed your anal area with soap and water and rinsed it, you have not cleaned off all the microbes. Same with washing your hands–you don’t rub your hands with a towel until after you’ve rinsed all the soap off.
If you’re rubbing a soapy dish with a towel, you’re smearing a bunch of microbes around. Some of them will stick to the towel, but not enough of them. Rinsing must come before drying with a towel.
I rinse dishes, but it’s got nothing to do with removing bacteria. I’m not washing dishes to remove bacteria in the first place. I’m washing them to remove food residue that bacteria could live on, and that would be crusty and gross when I use the dish again.
A dry plate, even if it has soap residue, is not a hospitable environment for bacteria. They’re not going to multiply into a dangerous colony and it’s very unlikely a dish in my home is going to expose me to bacteria I don’t already have all over me.
In a restaurant or cafeteria environment you might worry about bacteria, but the key to keeping them away isn’t rinsing, it’s doing the washing with hot enough water.
Dip a large bowl in soapy water and wipe it off with a towel. Then, fill the bowl again with water. Notice the multicolored sheen on the surface of the water when it reflects light? There’s your leftover soap residue. That doesn’t happen when you rinse with water after using soap. If you’re eating anything wet, you’ll be eating soap.
But, if that’s purposely part of your diet, all the power to ya, I guess.
More significantly, you’ll be eating the dirt and microbes trapped in that soap, which doesn’t kill everything. Soap isn’t a sanitizer.
If you haven’t rinsed the dish, you haven’t removed all the food particles. Food particles can be smaller than it takes to see with the naked eye, and some of it will be trapped in the soap you have left on your plate.
Of course there are microbes that can live in dry environments.
Me neither. There’s an interesting new bit of information for the day.
Not gonna try it, though. For one thing, I don’t generally dry the dishes with a towel. I let them air dry in a dish drainer rack. I’m pretty sure there’s no way that’s going to get the soap off.
This. I make no pretense of sterilizing dishes when I wash them by hand. My goal is just to remove the food residue. There are bacteria all over my kitchen, all over my skin, and the bacteria on the fresh food I just ate are unlikely to be very harmful. (If they were, oops, too late.)
Even if you rinse the plates, you haven’t removed every molecule of food, nor have you removed all the microbes.
No, being on a clean, dry plate won’t kill bacteria (although it generally will kill viruses) but they won’t multiply, either.
If I’m worried about preventing the spread of disease in the household, I run the dishes through the dishwasher’s “sanitize” cycle. That doesn’t get them any cleaner than the regular cycle, but it heats them hot enough to kill most microbes.
And like you, I rinse my dishes but don’t dry them. The air does that just fine. The only exceptions to that are silver and wine glasses. I guess I do dry those, or they can spot. But I wash the silver and the wine glasses a couple of times a year, and despite owning a dishwasher, I hand wash a few dishes pretty much every day.
Huh? Soap makes an enormous difference in removing grease, and also helps remove protein scum. I admit it doesn’t make a ton of difference for sugars and starch.
I washed by hand (mostly in California) for more than 40 years, and have lived with mechanical dishwashers for almost 20 years. By hand, I just stuffed stuff under the suds and scrubbed, then rinsed. By machine, I pre-rinsed awhile but noticed stuff not coming clean. Turns out modern dishwashing machines look for debris. Leave the debris and more is washed away. What you do with your soiled tableware and cookware is your own affair. Don’t tell me.