Cooking is a great way to de-stress but if the thought of cleaning your kitchen after enjoying your meal gives you anxiety, you need this tip: make a soapy marinade in your sink to soak dishes in, and dinner cleanup will be quick and stress-free. While loading dirty cookware into the dishwasher as you go makes kitchen clean-up easier, not everyone has a machine. Moreover, larger items, like skillets and colanders don’t fit well in compact-style dishwashers, and so can affect the performance of the wash cycle. Other kitchen utensils, such as box graters, and measuring cups, often need to be washed by hand because of their unusual shape, as do items that aren’t dishwasher safe, like cast iron and copper pots.
Moreover, your complicated recipe might not give you the leeway to shove dirty cookware into the dishwasher, particularly if you’re preparing something that you can’t leave unattended, such as a stir-fry or a sauce that needs to be stirred regularly. Having said that, you’ll likely have a couple of moments spare to dump dirty items into the sink as you work, much like a line cook who keeps their station clean while they are also busy cooking.
Turning on the faucet and squirting some dish soap into the sink takes seconds, conserves water, and creates a steamy soapy environment for dirty cookware items to soak until you’re ready to wash them. This simple move also frees up your countertops and stove from clutter, so you can wipe them down while your dirty dishes soak.
Soapy suds cling to the grease on dirty cookware
The benefit of tossing your utensils and pans in a soapy solution as you go along is that the heat from the water will help to loosen and lift any fragments of food stuck to your skillets or spoons. This means you won’t need to waste energy or time scrubbing them ferociously with a sponge later; the soapy water will do most of the hard work for you while you finish preparing the other elements of your meal. The suds will bind themselves to any fatty residues on the surface of your cookware because dish soap contains clever molecules that cling to grease and pull it away from crockery and pans.
Finally, all those greasy residues will drain down the plughole once you come to finish washing and rinsing them, leaving you with the simple task of giving your sink a swift scrub to achieve an effortlessly clean kitchen. The dish soap left in the basin should be sufficient to clean the surface, whether it’s made of stainless steel or resin. But for extra sparkle, you can employ any of these clever hacks to cleaning your kitchen sink, which include using baking powder, vinegar, and even flour as natural cleaning agents.
