You Don’t Have A Paid Dishwasher
Cleaning sucks, and will always suck. You can make it suck less.
I had to wash dishes for months before I was allowed to even toast bread to make myself a shift meal. I know how to clean kitchens like a motherfucker thanks to that.
Months of washing dishes for 8–10 hours a day will teach you how to keep a kitchen clean with the least effort. But half of those dish-pit secrets don’t translate well to Home Kitchens.
Have no fear, I Rosetta Stone’d that knowledge to apply to your cozy little cook nook or whatever dumb thing you call your kitchen.
Start Clean, it Stays Clean
There’s no way around it: starting with a clean kitchen makes cooking easier and makes cleaning easier.
None of the below advice will do fuckall for you if your kitchen looks like Bagdhad in 2005.
Empty the dishwasher, the sink, and give your surfaces a wipedown BEFORE you become a tornado of culinary creation.
Plan based on what you’re cooking, and how you’re cooking it
Need to chop a bunch of onions and sauté them? Stage your cutting board near your stovetop so when you cut, you can transfer them to your pan without getting onions all over the damn place. Keep stuff close to where it is going to be prepared and utilized, to minimize travel in the kitchen.
Less wasted food product, and less shit to sweep up later. Sweeping is the bane of my existence, and I can’t afford a Roomba unless you wanna be my sugar mama.
Wandering Trash Cans
Literally just drag the trash can around with you when you’re prepping stuff. Those onions you sautéed? The tunic leaf (papery outer part) can be collected by using the knife you cut them with, and deposited right into the can for easy disposal.
You can put the trash can back after you’re done cooking, so your Feng Shui is unimpeded. But while you cook, keep your trash can within arm’s reach.
Reuse Reuse Reuse
Making a lot of dishes makes a lot of headache. Use the two working braincells you got, and figure out which tools and utensils can be used for multiple things.
When I scramble eggs in the morning, the whisk I used to scramble them is also the tool I use to stir them in the pan.
Rinse shit off, reuse it. You can do this for all sorts of things. You don’t need 3 cutting boards out if you know how to time things. Speaking of:
If you got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean (I hate this phrase, but there’s truth to it)
Almost nothing you’ll make is “all gas, no brakes” in terms of effort, so use those hurry-up-and-wait moments. Baking, Boiling, and Pre-heating don’t happen instantly. That’s a perfect time to assess your tools, and wash the ones that you’re not going to use any more.
If you’re done cutting vegetables, and the knife doesn’t have a use anymore, wipe it down and get it back in the knife-block. Load the mixing bowls in the dishwasher. Wipe down some surfaces with a lysol wipe (then follow with a clean dry rag, Lysol Chicken tastes disgusting.
Soaking: Not Just For Mormons
Some culinary greatness is just messy, and sometimes that mess is a Boss Fight of a cleanup job.
Some dish soap, hot water, and time to marinate will help with the stubbornly dirty dishes. Some stuff is too hot to scrub.
Some shit is just better left for the morning. Or after dessert.
Also: Look up Mormon Soaking. It’s hilarious.
Lemon Juice: The Secret Weapon
When I’m done pan-searing a steak (my favorite method of Steakery), I take a bottle of lemon juice and squeeze a big puddle of it into the pan. The acidity of the juice and the heat do a FANTASTIC job of getting that carbonized shit and oil off of my stainless steel.
Don’t do this on cast-iron, you can fuck up the coating you worked so hard to get on there. Also stop using so much cast-iron, that shit is way overrated. More on that another time.
Wash your fucking hands, you plague rat
Bacteria isn’t visible to the human eye. But puking and shitting your brains out totally is. Wash your hands between going from handling raw materials to cooked materials. Salmonella is a bitch and a half, and if you rubbed a bunch of spice into your raw chicken, you definitely need to soap up.
Plus, the human body itches sometimes. No one wants your Cordon Bleu with the Frumunda Cheese you got on your hands from scratching your nuts.
Gloves Are Dumb
I love when science accounts for human laziness and stupidity. Gloves are actually not as safe as cooking barehanded. Humans get too complacent, and gloves create more surfaces for bacteria to hide in.
There is no substitute for intelligent sanitary procedure.
Lose the latex gloves. Wash your goddamn hands. Don’t pick your nose or your ass.
Not Everything needs to go in the damn Dishwasher
Some stuff is easier to just wash, rinse, and hit with a dry rag. And that’s plenty sufficient. There are plenty of home kitchens without a dishwasher built in, and the people that live in them aren’t all dying of food poisoining. Knives, ladles, and stainless steel stuff can forego the dishwasher and get put away after a proper cleaning in the sink.
I always lose cleaning momentum when I fill the dishwasher and still have a fuckton of dishes in the sink, so I do this a lot with larger items.
Your kitchen doesn’t have to be spotless after a spirited cook session, but these tricks hopefully make the load a little bit more bearable, and keep you from being discouraged by cooking because of the mess that comes with it.
There you have it. Just some pointers to help reduce the imposing amount of mess that inevitable gets made when you take a trip to Flavortown.
Chef4Fingers hates cleaning things up and will use his dog as a Roomba whenever possible which is never because he puts onions in everygoddamnthing. He (Chef4Fingers, not the dog) can be found here on medium and on Twitter as TheChef4Fingers
