Plain White Vinegar Is the Dishwashing Hero You Need
Fat makes food taste good, but fatty foods can linger in the air — and on dishes — long after the meal is finished. If you are tired of finding oil stains on dishes that you swear they are clean, you should fill a spray bottle with vinegar in front of you and keep it next to the kitchen sink.
Vinegar can’t do half of what holistic health bloggers say it can, but its degreasing and deodorant properties make it an indispensable tool in my dishwashing arsenal. I use plastic soup containers to store everything from stews to cocktail syrups, so to avoid flavor contamination I need them to be completely clean. Watering liberally over a plastic soup container that once held a coconut curry – or especially an olive oil stew – with vinegar, it will come out of the dishwasher spotlessly clean and ready to be reused. (If you don’t have a dishwasher, pretreating greasy dishes with vinegar is even more important, especially if you have hard tap water .) Since the oil does trap odors, gargling with vinegar will also prevent and / or reduce the build-up of food debris. Smells like porous materials such as plastic and silicone I spray my silicone spatulas with vinegar and rinse them in hot water before each use to minimize the chance that old food (or soap) smells carry over to everything I do. Vinegar also decomposes dried bread dough faster than anything else I’ve used, which saved more than a few sponges from a messy sticky end.
As with any cleaning agent, vinegar has its limitations: it is not a surfactant and is not a broad spectrum disinfectant at about five percent acetic acid by weight. For gnarled, burnt fat, you are much better off using something like Barkeeper’s Friend , andvinegar on its owncannot kill the nastier microorganisms found in raw pork or chicken; What’s more, its acidity will corrode cookware made from reactive materials such as aluminum, cast iron, bare copper, and carbon steel. But for an effective light degreaser and deodorant – which also turns out to be completely food-safe – vinegar is pretty hard to beat.