Dishing out some advice

From the folks who helped give you the A-bomb and the NY Times, we provide some helpful, and perhaps explosive, advice:

Don’t bother prerinsing. Seriously!

In a 2021 study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, over half of respondents reported that they rinse their dishes before loading them into the dishwasher. Despite what you may have been told in the past, prerinsing is not necessary. Modern dishwashers have never been better at removing grime. This, coupled with enzymatic detergents, which are designed to attack soils, all but ensures a thorough clean. (Remember to be realistic, though: Philip Voglewede, a mechanical engineering professor at Marquette University who formerly worked in the dishwasher division of Whirlpool Corporation, emphasized that if a food is challenging to wash off by hand, expect your dishwasher to be challenged, too.)

Every dishwasher company, detergent company, and independent expert we’ve talked to says that prerinsing is unnecessary—as does the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of our sources even said you might get better results without prerinsing because modern enzymatic detergents work better when they can cling to food. When you skip the prerinse, you’ll also save a bunch of water, energy, and effort. (There are many stubborn holdouts, but we’ve seen skeptics morph into believers after skipping the prerinse once. Why not give it a go?)

We’ve also confirmed this with our own tests, over and over and over again. In one round of testing, we ran 12 different dishwashers loaded with some of the crustiest, most stubborn food stains. With zero prerinsing by us, they almost always did a great job. We repeated the tests a handful of times for each model and got the same results. There were a couple of exceptions: Some models struggled when we used discount, store-brand detergent, but they did better when we tried a stronger, name-brand formula. So if you think your dishwasher just doesn’t work without prerinsing, try a different detergent (see below) or find out whether a little bit of maintenance helps (also see below).

Worried that all the food will clog and eventually ruin the dishwasher? This won’t happen: Modern dishwashers have filters to catch any chunks of food that would be big enough to jam the system. Though the food sits in the filter, it gets worn down by the combination of the enzymes in the detergent and water pressure. Eventually it gets pulverized into tiny bits that can pass through the filter’s tight mesh to be pumped out the drain. You’ll need to clean the filter periodically, and it’s a good idea to scrape foods like leafy greens, corn, beans, and hunks of meat (they dissolve very slowly)....

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/guides/how-to-use-your-dishwasher-better/.