Sunday Morning Post (V.3 #6) – The Pre-Rinse Paradox

Warrior Queen set off an interesting debate in one of her posts this past week regarding where she puts her dirty dishes.  She set it in the guise of something you don’t know about her.  In the end, she confessed and now the whole world knows: she does not put her dirty Fiesta plates, bowls, cups and silverware directly into anything resembling a modern dishwasher. 

The dirty dishes are placed rather helter skelter into the kitchen sink and from there…oh, who the hell knows.  Eventually the plates, etc. pile up higher than the sink itself, making use of the faucet to fill any container, say a cup, totally impossible.  At some point, it’s up to the other being with opposable thumbs living in the house to arrange the dishes neatly in the dishwasher in such a way to guarantee the most efficient cleaning.  In other words, moi.

Most of the dishes can be placed in one of three racks of our dishwasher.  Many times, there are dishes that still have dried food residue, or crud, on the surface. These dishes are given a quick rinse under a running spigot before they are placed into the automatic dishwasher.  With all due respect to those bloggers who feel that this rinsing action makes the subsequent washing unnecessary, I must come out as an advocate of a manual pre-rinse.

Any food stuff allowed to stay on the plate surface when it is placed into the dishwasher raises the possibility that the crud will not magically wash away and down the dishwasher drain.  Many times, given the heat of the water inside the machine, the crud becomes baked onto the plate surface.  Now you have a plate which has theoretically been cleaned, but it comes out with a very hard wart on its surface.  Sometimes the baked crud is harder than the plate itself.  At this point one can rinse the plate again in the sink and, perhaps by using a steel wool pad or a butter knife, scrape the wart off the plate. 

At this point, you have two choices:  put the plate away in the cupboard because you believe it’s as clean as it ever will be, or put it back into the dishwasher for another cleansing.  My theory is that the pre-rinse will get the stuff that could accumulate and block the pipes under the appliance, and that the dishwashing action itself sterilizes the plate for its next use.  A sterile dish is a very good thing in these times when the COVID-19 pandemic has made germophobes of all of us.

The pre-rinse is particularly useful when you have members in the household who do not finish everything on their dishes and the remaining food is allowed to dry before it is gathered up to be consigned to the sink.  Most households have human offspring which do this.  We have cats who seldom finish everything in their bowls.  I find it necessary to run these bowls under the spigot so that the leftover food falls into the garbage disposal where it meets its ignominious fate.

Also keep in mind that pre-rinsing does not guarantee that a plate will be clean enough to use for the next meal.  Warrior Queen has often told me about one of her aunts who would allow her dogs to lick the plates clean.  The plates were then not hand washed in the sink or even placed in a dishwasher.  The dishes were put away in the cupboard directly from the canine tongue action.

I will leave you with that image in your mind.  Yummy!

(Thank you for reading. Thus ended the lesson.)