Years ago, I have a coworker who love wood cutting boards and also like to machine washing them. Needless to say, she noticed that her cutting boards rarely last more than a year, and she had to replace them often. I told her that wood cutting boards are not suitable for dish washers, and she should hand wash them, or she should use plastic cutting boards. However, she does not believe hand washing is thorough and she simply likes wood cutting boards more than plastic cutting boards. So she stayed the course and kept putting wood cutting boards in dish washing machines.
Know any interesting poor cookware practice from your friends or even yourself which be get âstuckâ?
Have a kitchen full of tinned copper and carbon steel knives and any guests using your kitchen will display nothing but poor practices. Metal spoons and whisks on the tin, knives used to cut tomatoes or lemons left unrinsed, any of those things, or your beloved tiny aluminum sauce pan, put in the dishwasher, empty pans left on burners, acidic things left in seasoned CS (not as big a deal since they are easily reseasoned), and, of course, abused wooden implements and cutting boards. So I scurry around behind them as if I were the newb in a high end restaurant kitchen, keeping the line stocked and taking care of things needing washing.
And of course forgetting to chill the martini glasses!
Metal whisks and metal spoons inside tinned copper was all I ever saw.
You should fire up YouTube and watch old âGreat Chefs of Franceâ episodes. They whisk inside tinned copper pots using metal whisks like thereâs no tomorrow, use big metal spoons and beat the top edges of copper pots with said spoons like an Indian war drum.
Somehow I think Julia and Jacques would beat the living daylights out of their cookware if they were cooking on a tight schedule.
Not that that makes it ok, but I can almost see the glee in their eyesâŚ
LOL!
I am betting their kitchens rack up huge re-tinning bills. I imagine that in the days of there being a lot of copper in restaurants, that was just a cost of doing business, hopefully lower than it would be today. I have used whisks in copper and banged spoons on the rim, but I am pretty gentle on the tin. I note my first whisk is heavily
tinned. I imagine tin on tin was gentler than steel on tin.
2 Likes
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
6
My MIL used to put absolutely everything through the dishwasher. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter Iâd have to go behind her when she was âhelpingâ us clean up, and pull my Waterford crystal back out of my dishwasher.
Pans. Knives. Even wooden-handled knives! Sheâd put pans in the bottom rack of her older dishwasher and wonder why the bowls or glasses on top would end up with crumbs adhered inside.
My only real abuse of kitchenware is my propensity to use a knife as a screwdriver.
I am the opposite when it comes to dishwashers. I gutted and renovated (with a GC) an old condo in 2008 and put in all new appliances, including a dishwasher. In 2018 I was prepping my condo to sell it and I realized that the DW I had installed for resale purposes had never been used in the 10 years I lived in the condo. I called a home inspector I knew and he said to just run it a couple times and see whether it leaked or not. Luckily, it did not.
It just seems easier and faster to clean up as you are cooking and right after you finish eating. But I am usually cooking for just me and occasionally for my GF. I would be singing a different tune if I was cooking for a family.
This isnât a cardinal sin if the pieces are duplicates and retinned when needed. And theyâre not out of service long when serviced by a local or itinerant tinner. Itâs a lot bigger deal when you have only one copy of a pan and have to ship it away for weeks.
The dishwasher for everything. I still am annoyed that I bought a nice stainless steel serving spoon, which maybe cost $25 15 years ago, and I intended to use it for entertaining, for a Chowhound potluck hosted at another Chowhoundâs house, and my new spoon was handed back to me looking like garbage.
My momâs friend or friendâs adult children wrecked the AllClad Paella pan I gave my mom, which she brought to a potluck, as well. The pan had been used twice before these people wrecked it.
Also, a friend stirred pasta sauce repeatedly with a stainless spoon, hitting the bottom of a new Cuisinart saucepan, which was my first splurge at 26. The bottom of the pan was scratched. I still use the saucepan, but I think it had been used once when he did that.
Always amazes me how stupid and careless other people can be.
Ages ago I sent two saucepans to a guy named Jamie for re-tinning. I sent them in early fall. I got an AC saucier to get me through the holidays. The saucepans eventually returned after six months plus. The AC is the pan I let guests use unwatched, the pan I use for things I am apt to forget and allow to boil dry (grains taking over forty minutes), and a few easy boiling jobs. It also enables me to speak from experience about AC performance and handles. I prefer the much less pricey Cuisinart.
I only use my dishwasher after Iâve had company over, and itâs been 4 years since I did that. Itâs a good place to store extra mason jars and an oversized skillet.
Now that I think about it. I lent a friend of mine a CarboNext knife. It is not a true stainless steel knife, but has ok amount of chromium to keep it from rusting. JCK Original KAGAYAKI CarboNext Series | Mysterious Steel (japanesechefsknife.com)
Anyway, I was sharpening her knives and lend her this CarboNext knife as a loaner. She put it in a dishwasher and knife color turned from shiny to dull. She felt bad about it. The truth is that the knife probably will gradually get to that dull color in 10 years or so, and the dishwasher probably just speed up the process. The knife is still totally functional. I still have the knife.
However, yeah, I can imagine that machine dishwasher can ruin certain things for good. For example, more than knives, I have some nicer ceramic/clayware which I would never put in a dishwasher. For example, I got this nice clayware teapot (I have many, but this is probably my best one). No way, I would put this in a dishwasher. It will kill the teapot.
Dishwashers are efficient, but they can be too aggressive.
My nephewâs nanny used to use knives as can openers. We couldnât understand why the tips were bent, and a couple chipped off. Till someone saw her do it once.
5 Likes
BarneyGrubble
(Beethoven and Latina singer fan in Ottawa)
19
Not food-related, but I thought I would blow a fuse when a guest casually put a teacup containing tea on top of my very expensive preamplifier (Iâm an audiophile). Fortunately my wife spotted it immediately and asked me if it was okay. Keep my cool, I said no; my wife removed it promptly. The clueless guest had no reaction.
Trying to self-reflect. One habit I try to stop/slow down is to wait for the cookware to cool down before cleaning them. For some cookware, putting water into a hot cookware can hurt them â such as warping or cracking. It is one of those challenges for me. If I clean too fast, then I add stress to the cookware. If I wait too long, then the food particles dried up and becoming more difficult to clean.
