"Every hardcore dish-doer, Kristen pointed out, has their own special technique. There is no one way, just as there is no one way to clean a house or make a soup. But peeking into someone’s cleaning routine holds all the greedy pleasure of peeking into a lit-up living room at night."
I used to be a professional dishwasher at a college dining hall. (I was also a shift lead/head cook at the same hall; a weird and wonderful time.) I could then (and, honestly, I wager I still could, despite me being a decade plus older) run laps around anyone else washing dishes; where two would wash while one managed drying & putting away, I could force two to be frantically finding new and creative ways to stack dishes to keep the output counter of the track-style commercial washing machine clear. My machine like efficiency was rooted in solid technique, careful water use, an aggressive use of a scraping tool, and a ferocious amount of energy (ok, maybe I couldn't keep up with me then).
It feels impolite to brag about just how powerful a washer I am, but I've been thinking about it a lot recently for some reason: I can wash for a hundred people within a shockingly short amount of time. Some of what I've learned is basically only helpful when you have a three section sink, a stainless steel counter as big as most kitchens, a powerful spray wand hanging over The Mouth of a terrifyingly powerful garbage disposal, and a rack-shunting commercial washing machine running somewhere close to 200° F, but a lot of it holds true wherever I wash.
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scrape. Scrape everything. Scrubbing means you're sanding down from the top; scraping pops the whole chunk of gunk in one fell swoop. My favorite tools at home are a bamboo wooden spatulaspoon and a bench knife (both forms: the rigid metal kind and the plastic bowl scraper kind); the Kitchen was basically 100% aluminum cookware so I went to town with a putty knife
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you only need a sprinkling of water to soak something. This is especially true for plates/bowls: lightly spray/rinse and then stack. You don't need to fill each vessel with water & your goal is rehydrating so it'll come off easy with a later rinse and/or scrape.
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a hot pot is a easy pot. I like to cook curries and stews and stirfries and other one-pot type meals, and I always pull the leftovers out while everything is still warm so I can clean it asap. In the Kitchen, we'd always shout a warning when we dropped a hot pan onto the dishpile, and I always took that as a invitation--as soon as it was barely cool enough to handle I had it in hand for a scraping (I had awesome calluses back then 🥲). A rinse is so much more effective while the food is warm, a scrape far more likely to lift everything in one judicious push.
I've been missing the flow of a kitchen recently. The heat and steam, the cycle of food, the satisfaction of winning a moment of respite in a seemingly constant flow of dishes. It's terrible on the body, and the pay:labor ratio is atrocious. But. There's a joy there I have yet to find anywhere else. If UBI was a thing, and we weren't stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of exploitation of our best workers, I would go back.
