Washing dishes
Why write this?
In our house I do the dishes.
Over the years I have washed a lot of dishes, and recently some of our friends have commented on the speed with which I work and asked me to share my 'secrets' to help them with their own dishwashing. Really?
Worse yet, some friends and relatives have encountered my wrath when they have ignorantly disrupted my system despite being asked to leave the work to me.
This little paper is my attempt to summarize my techniques for anyone who cares.
Dishwashing is a system
My training is in science and engineering. Engineers are trained to think in terms of systems, and dishwashing benefits from systems thinking.
My system is a set of little observations, tricks, and techniques assembled over years of washing dishes. My system works for me. It might not work for you, though you may find tidbits in it that are useful for you. Vaya con Dios.
My dishwashing context
We have a dishwasher, a machine installed under the counter that holds a goodly quantity of dishes, glasses, silverware, and so on. It does a pretty good job of cleaning if you load it thoughtfully. It is very slow.
We have a big sink with counter space both to the left and the right. By the sink I have dish soap, a scrubby sponge, a stainless steel scrubbing pad, and a dish brush. In the kitchen we have a supply of tea towels that we use when drying by hand.
There is a pull-out garbage can near the sink. This lets me hold something messy in one hand and open the garbage with the other, clean, hand and toss the messy thing in without spreading mess around the kitchen.
We will come back again to the question of managing hygiene.
Sort everything
Stuff comes from the dining table in a chaotic mess. Each plate comes with some silverware and may also have some uneaten food on it. The first thing to do is scrape the food residue into the composting receptacle or garbage and stack the plates. I generally put all of the silverware into the sink. I stack the plates by size, with the dinner plates stacked together, the salad plates stacked together, the water glasses clustered together, and so on.
Generally I try to keep the sink empty, other than for the silverware. If you pile stuff in the sink, you will just have to take it all out again when you need to wash things by hand. So keep the sink empty.
Serving dishes generally don't sort and stack that easily, but there aren't all that many of them. At this stage leftovers get packaged and put away in the fridge.
Once things are sorted you can get a better idea of the scale of the problem. How many plates, how many cups, how much silverware? This will let you make decisions about where to put things to make best use of space in the dishwasher, what things can not go in the dishwasher, and what order to wash things that you do by hand.
Once everything is sorted, we can get down to the real work - loading the dishwasher and washing by hand the things that don't go in the dishwasher.
Loading the dishwasher
Theoretical computer scientists have proved that true efficiency in packing a 3D space like a dishwasher with oddly shaped items is a nearly intractable problem, so there is no point pursuing some ideal of perfection. That is a waste of time.
Nonetheless, there are a number of principles that you can apply that will help you get the most from your dishwasher.
Load small things into the dishwasher, wash big things by hand
To a first approximation, a big thing takes about as much time to wash as a small thing. This is not absolutely true, but weight for weight or surface area for surface area, small things take more time to wash by hand than big things. And you can get a lot of small things in a dishwasher - they pack better. So, unless you have several dishwashers, you should wash the big things by hand and load the small things into the dishwasher.
Make sure all dish and utensil surfaces are unobstructed and accessible
Dishwashers clean by spraying jets of hot water on the dishes. You need to position things so that no dish is touching another and so that the water sprays can get at every part of every dish. When one dish is touching another, one or both may be blocked from the cleaning jets of water. If so, you may find a dish or utensil that remains dirty when you empty the dishwasher.
Obviously, cups and glasses need to be put in upside down so that water can drain properly. Beware of cups and glasses that are less stable … sometimes they can turn over during the run, so you will find a cup full of dirty water that you will need to carefully extract (so that the dirty water doesn't spill on and soil otherwise clean dishes) and then wash by hand.
Be careful also with utensils with cupped surfaces, like spoons. Make sure that they are positioned so that the water can drain from them.
Loading Silverware
Most contemporary dishwashers have a tray near the top for silverware. This tray lets you lay the silverware down on its side. There are a few tricks for taking best advantage of these trays. The most important trick is to align things like spoons so that their concave sides face the convex sides of their neighbors.
Some attention to detail on loading the dishwasher will also save you time when unloading. Since our silverware drawer has separate spaces for forks, for instance, if you can take all of the forks out at once you will save time putting them away. A little care in loading will save you time when unloading.
Silverware baskets
Instead of a rack, some older dishwashers have a basket for silverware and utensils.
There are two challenges with these baskets:
First of all, two or more spoons might end up tightly nested together, thus preventing the dishwasher water jets from cleaning between them. When you unload the dishwasher you might find, as I have, spoons stuck together by food residue, still dirty. Ick. I find that mixing up the different utensils so that no two identical ones are right next to one another helps. Sometimes I put half of the spoons in bowl down and the other half bowl up.
The second issue comes from knives, particularly pointed ones. If you put knives in handle down, then you risk poking yourself with the sharp ends when loading and unloading the basket. If you put the knives in blade down you may find that the sharp tips get stuck in the bottom of the basket, making getting them out a bit of a struggle. Plus, over time, the bottom of the basket will be damaged.
Hygiene - washing by hand - dirty side and clean side
This section applies to the hand washing phase of the project. By the time you start on this section you have loaded the dishwasher and started it running. (There is another section about what to do if there is more than one dishwasher load.)
Once you have cleaned an item it is quite important not to handle it again with dirty hands, since that will dirty it and make you have to wash it all over again. So a serious dishwasher will put all of the dirty dishes on one side of the sink, moving the clean ones to a prepared clean surface on the other side as they are washed.
Before I start on the hand washing I thoroughly clean and dry one counter surface adjoining the sink. I then lay one or two tea towels down ready to receive clean things. When I hand wash dishes I start with the dirty ones on the left and put each on the right after I wash it. Your kitchen might make a right-to-left flow work better. You decide.
As I wash things I lay them on the clean area. There is some art to sequencing the hand washing so that you can build a pile that does not fall over and that will air dry in a reasonable amount of time.
Air drying is slower than drying with a towel, but it also takes a lot less labor. And if your drying towels are ill-mannered enough to leave lint on your dishes you will be unhappy. Your lint might be clean, but it doesn't belong on dishes.
Too many dishes for one dishwasher load
What a great dinner party! Everyone was there. The conversation was sparkling. The food was great. The amount of wine drunk was astonishing. The dishwasher is packed and the things to wash by hand are ready to be washed, but there are still plates, glasses, and silverware that didn't make it into the dishwasher.
Welcome to executive decision time.
Here are some of your choices:
- You can go to bed and come back in the morning. Unload the dishwasher and put the clean things away. Then reload the dishwasher with the stuff that did not make it into the dishwasher the previous night. That whirring sound in the distance is my grandmother spinning in her grave that I left dirty dishes overnight.
- You can put the dishwasher-suitable things aside and just wash the hand wash items. In the morning come back and reload the dishwasher with the overflow. Whirring sound.
- You can wash the hand wash items first, then hand wash the dishwasher overflow items.
The decision depends partly on how much did not make it into the dishwasher. If it's only a few things, then what the heck, wash them by hand. If it's a lot, then either wash the hand wash items or leave them for the morning, depending on how tired or inebriated you are. It's your call - you are the captain. Over the years I have learned to ignore the whirring sound.
Degreasing
Invariably you will be confronted with a baking pan that is coated with a thick layer of liquid or congealed fat or grease. If you try washing this mess you will quickly discover that it is very hard to degrease. You squeeze a lot of dishwashing detergent on your sponge and go at it. The net result is a very greasy sponge.
Here is what is going on. Soaps and detergents are sophisticated molecules. One end of the molecule is called hydrophilic, meaning that it likes to connect to water. The other end is called hydrophobic – it dislikes water and likes connecting to oil molecules. So when you wash a greasy utensil, molecules of soap or detergent bind to each molecule of fat by their hydrophobic end so that the hydrophilic ends can connect to the water, thus dissolving the molecule of fat and letting it be carried away in the water.
So, how much soap or detergent do you need for any given amount of fat or grease?
To understand that we need to delve into some technical chemistry.
We refer to the mass of molecules in terms of grams per mole. A mole is defined as a quantity of the pure substance containing Avogadro's number (roughly 6x1023 molecules, though it matters less what the number is than that it is a constant that everyone agrees on) molecules. Common food fats have a molar mass of about 850 grams per mole. Common soaps have a molar mass of around 300 grams per mole. Common hand dishwashing detergents range in molar mass between 200 and 450 grams per mole.
Notice that the soaps and dishwashing detergents are within a factor of two of the molar mass of the fats and greases that you are trying to get rid of. And the density of the two is about the same as well. What this means, if we assume that it requires one or more molecules (general opinion is that it takes four to ten) of soap or detergent to carry away one molecule of fat, you need a LOT of liquid detergent or soap to degrease a greasy pan. That's why the soapy sponge seems so ineffective in clearing the grease.
What can you do with a greasy pan?
Well, get some hot water running. Get a good scrub brush or scouring pad. Run the hot water on the greasy pan and scour it with the pad or brush. The bulk of the grease will be carried away without dissolving. After the bulk of the grease is gone you can deploy the soapy sponge to get the final film off of the pan.
Always hand wash these things
Wooden items never go in the dishwasher. The hot water from the dishwasher will damage the wood over time. You have a surprising number of wooden items in your kitchen. Cutting boards and various spoons. Salad bowls. Various serving items.
Good knives never go in the dishwasher. I try to wash these by hand after the cook is done with them and before we sit down to dinner, but that's not always possible. I try to wash them first. Be very careful with the sharp knives … if your guests get out of control and you find the sink full of dark water, beware that they might have put a sharp knife down there for you to grab with your bare hands. That can cut you badly. Ask me how I know.
Hand wash only things - my pet peeve
Never give anyone a "hand wash only" item. Ever. I don't buy them for our kitchen and I never give them as gifts. Why? Because giving someone a hand wash only item also saddles them with two extra burdens - first, to remember that it is a hand wash only item, and second, the need to spend the extra time to wash it by hand when it might otherwise go in the dishwasher. It is rude to say to someone, "I think you have so much spare time that you should spend it washing this thing by hand."
Grump.
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