As everyone knows, there is a right way, in addition to numerous wrong ways, to load a dishwasher. This is much discussed in households across this great land of ours, as well as overseas. Where there is a dishwasher, there is a fight.
What is less often discussed is the fact — to me, indisputable — that there is also a right and a wrong way to unload a dishwasher. We will discuss, here, how to handle this thorny problem, and you, Grasshopper, will be enlightened, and then do one of two things: either smite your forehead and go “how did I never understand this before?” or say “God, this woman is a bitch.”
First, we will have a short discussion of how to load the dishwasher: I am sorry about this but it needs doing.
Let us presume that you have a dishwasher of the type where you pull down the door, which is hinged at the bottom of the machine, and that inside the machine there are two sliding racks, placed one on top of the other, for holding things that need washing. The bottom rack has been carefully designed by someone such that it will hold things that are large or large-ish, and probably fairly heavy. Think here: plates; flatware; the occasional Pyrex baking pan, glass mixing bowl, or stainless steel pot. Things you have not put on this lower rack include: any plastic item designed as food storage, any cast iron anything, lids to the plastic items for storing food. There are reasons why you don’t put these things in the bottom rack. Good reasons. All plastic items should be on the top rack, in hopes that the object will not melt in the heat of the dishwasher; and cast iron (including enameled cast iron) objects simply have no business in a dishwasher. If you want to throw your money away, that’s your business. If you want a rusted mess, a ruined $300 Le Creuset pot, I reiterate: that’s your business. But a sensible person will not put these things in the dishwasher.
Moving forward: the top rack of the dishwasher is, again, carefully designed, much like the bottom rack, but for holding different sorts of things. There are spaces designed for glasses and coffee mugs, spaces designed for smaller glasses (like juice glasses), and many prongs that are capable of handling different types of objects. Some people put small bowls on the top rack. The top rack is where you put your Tupperware and Rubbermaid and Ikea food storage pieces, and their lids; you must make sure that these things are face down, which is to say, their open sides face down into the dishwasher, not up, because otherwise these objects will not be clean. The same is true of all drinking vessels. They must have their open sides facing down. Otherwise what happens is, during the dishwashing cycle, they just fill up with water and sit there like little tiny birdbaths in your dishwasher, and this is totally pointless.
If you’re one of those people whose dishwasher has a rack at the top for loading in flatware, bully for you! No, I mean it; I bet that’s really cool. Pro-tip: don’t throw things in there such that the schmutz on your forks and spoons can’t get washed away. Spoons should not be bowl-up, but on their sides or bowl-down. Make sure that spoons don’t accidentally nestle into each other, because they will not get clean that way, and you’ll be annoyed. Ok, maybe you won’t be annoyed. But I will be annoyed. Even if you live two thousand miles away from me and I’ve never met you or seen your dishwasher, I will know about it and I will be annoyed.
No object in the dishwasher should have its dirty surfaces blocked from soapy water by another object.
This means that plates and bowls can nestle near each other, but should not be placed in such a way that, say, the cereal dried onto a breakfast bowl won’t get blasted clean during the wash cycle because it’s placed so close to a plate that the plate serves as a lid on the upright bowl.
You load the dishwasher correctly; you run the dishwasher. It beeps; the machine is telling you the stuff inside is clean. So you open the dishwasher. How do you unload the dishwasher?
If you are the sort of person who uses some special Product to assure that your dishes and plastic tubs and glassware will all come out of the dishwasher 100% dry, good on you. Presumably you can do whatever the fuck you want. We, however, do not use this stuff, because I view it as a relatively pointless frill, and expensive. So the matter of how to unload the dishwasher is Significant.
The crux of the problem is this: If you open the dishwasher and draw out the top rack first, leaving the bottom rack in the machine, you are going to have water fall from the top rack onto the stuff on the bottom rack. There’s always a teaspoon of water collected in the punt of your glasses or mugs (I mean the indentation at the bottom of your cup. On a wine bottle, it’s called the punt; I have no idea if the word applies equally to beer steins and coffee mugs but it ought to, if it doesn’t.) These little pools of water are inevitable, in my experience. And annoying. Because you don’t want to hand-dry everything in the damned machine, do you?
You do not. And so anyone with a modicum of sense will do as follows:
You will open the dishwasher and you will pull out the bottom rack first. Yes, the top rack is closer to you, but do the fucking bottom rack first, ok? This will allow you to get the heavy stuff out of the way, for one thing, and, for another thing, assure that everything from there gets out of there and put away while still dry from whatever heat blasters your dishwasher has built into it. Nothing from the top rack will have been jostled and, hence, they will not have had a chance to rain on your nice clean, dry dishes and flatware.
Get the dishes stacked, get the bowls stacked. Put them in their homes, wherever that might be. If you can reach those cabinets while standing at the dishwasher, cool. If not: make stacks and tote them over, pile by pile, to the cabinet where they need to go. Put them away. My own method, which relies on my being a healthy person with reasonable upper-body strength, is to stack the dinner dishes, then stack the pasta bowls on the dishes, and then big cereal bowls in the pasta bowls and then the small cereal/ice cream bowls. I cannot reach the dish shelves while standing at the dishwasher, but I can make it so that stacking everything means I only make one quick movement to bring everything to the correct cabinet, and then spend 15 seconds putting the stacks away.
Then I pull out the removable rack where the flatware’s standing, and bring it three steps over to the silverware drawer, and put the flatware away. The rack goes back into the dishwasher.
It will probably take about 90 seconds to empty the bottom rack of the dishwasher. Less if half of it’s been taken up with a casserole pan or something like that.
The top rack is to be pulled out only after the bottom rack is empty. Leave the bottom rack out, though: if your dishwasher is like one I’m acquainted with where the top rack’s a little hinky and occasionally comes off its runners and wants to fall, the empty bottom rack will likely help catch the top rack, but since it’s empty you don’t run the risk of shattering anything in it.
Not that I have personal experience with this or anything.
You want to have either a drying rack available on the kitchen counter, or have at hand a nice clean kitchen towel, because, as we’ve acknowledged, stuff on the top rack tends to have water left on it or in it. We have a set of beer steins that have very deep punts and there’s inevitably a tablespoon of water puddled in in the underside of those steins every time we run them in the dishwasher. You can turn them right side up and let them air-dry in the rack (or lay them down sideways, either way works), or you can dab the dishtowel on them and take care of it in two seconds. Regardless, you want things to be really dry before you put them away.
Things can be stacked in the dish rack to finish air-drying with a clear conscience so long as you place them in a manner that actually allows them to dry. Just as with loading the dishwasher, if things are too close together, or not in the right position, they will not dry. Plastic food storage tub lids are particularly evil in this way: water stays in these tiny crevices if you don’t angle the lids so that the water can drain off.
I beg of you, at this point: Do not regard the drain rack as an excuse for not having to put things away. You do, eventually, have to put things away. For reasons. Really. The best one being, Come the time of the day when you want to eat or drink something, you shouldn’t have to sift through seventy-five plastic cups, coffee mugs, random spoons, and miscellaneous food storage container lids to find the bowl, plate, or cup you want. It should be right there on the shelf. Clean, dry.
The second best reason for just putting your shit away is that if you don’t put your shit away, what happens is, the next time you have dishes to dry, you throw them on top of the stuff in the rack that’s already dried, and you make them wet again. This is basically disrespectful to your stuff, and it makes your household more chaotic than it should be. We are all intimate with households where no one can ever find anything because basically every kitchen utensil is always in the dish rack, and nothing’s ever dry. So when you need a plate to put your toasted cheese sandwich on, ok, sure, there’s a plate nearby, but it’s kinda…. wet. Do you really want to put your toasted cheese sandwich down on a wet plate?
I know people who will say “why should I put anything away when it’s easy to get the thing from the dish rack right here?” and I get it except that the thought of a damp toasted cheese sandwich makes me want to hurl. Plus it means you’re always looking at this massive pile of crap, which is not pleasant for anyone. I love looking at my kitchen stuff, I do, but it only looks pretty if it’s neatly placed on a shelf or lined up on the counter or whatever it’s supposed to be. Jumbled up in a rack, it all looks like miscellaneous crap.
There’s another issue at stake, too, which is the maintenance of your stuff. Having acquired (I’m not saying necessarily ‘purchased’) your kitchen stuff, you want it to last. You want it to work well. This means, for example, you don’t want rust forming on your pots or knives.
I know you’re going, “What are you talking about, rust on your knives? What kind of bullshit is that?” I guess no one has knives like that anymore. Except, here’s the thing, I have one. It came to me from my parents’ kitchen and could only have been purchased by my father, because God knows my mother would never buy a knife that required attention of any type. I don’t know where or when he got it, but I do know that when I took it to Harper Keehn, Amazing Knife Sharpener Guy, he picked it up and said, impressed, “You do not see knives like these anymore, this is great!” It’s a great little knife, it really is, but it must be dried by hand immediately after washing, otherwise this weird crud develops on the blade, and that weird crud furthermore will discolor anything I cut into. In other words, if I don’t take proper care of the knife, things get gross pretty quickly. You do not want to cut into a big white onion and see these little wisps of grey schmutz on the onion.
Our other knives — whatever they’re made of, stainless steel, who knows — are not nearly as finicky. Any fool can wash them by hand and set them in the drain rack and let them drip dry and it’s totally cool.
But that one knife: if anyone uses it and leaves it to drip dry in the rack, I get angry. Because I want that knife to last forever, and I want it to not stain my food weird colors, and that means we have to handle it with proper respect. We recently had a small problem when someone who shall remain nameless used this knife and washed it and then left it to dry in the drain rack, where an astonishing substance that looked exactly and horrifically like blood encrusted the blade. When I noticed this knife, about four hours after it had been used, I gasped and said, “no, no, no, no, no,” and immediately set to work on rescuing it. We have now declared a moratorium on nameless people using said knife. Because I don’t want to use a knife that looks like I used it to kill our cats.
The last point in this vein — so to speak — is that if you leave everything piled precariously in the dish rack, you are much more likely to accidentally break a handle off your favorite coffee mug, shatter your drinking glass, nick a chip into your plate (which will then turn into a crack, which will mean you have to throw out the plate, sooner or later, depending on the severity of the crack and how much you worry about things like awful chemicals leaching into your food from the things you eat off of; I worry about this stuff less than you would imagine, but I do think about it). Let me reiterate: put the damned dishes away.
Le Corbusier (Google him if you don’t know who he is) famously said that a house is a machine for living. There is one room in the house that most obviously proves this statement true, and that is the kitchen. If a kitchen is not well-designed, and the machines in that kitchen also well-designed, the users of the machine will be unhappy. I mean, they may not really be conscious of their unhappiness, or the cause of it, but it will absolutely affect their lives. Usually in a bad way.
Something I don’t think Le Corbusier talked about much was using the actual machines, whatever they were, correctly. But it’s important. The machines in the kitchen have to be used correctly by the users; to use them incorrectly will result in nothing good, and possibly, worst-case scenario, astronomical home-appliance repair or replacement bills.
A really badly designed dishwasher won’t let you put things in it well, and it might not work well; but then again I remember reading a review of dishwashers at Consumer Reports, many years ago, that pointed out that even a crappy design will probably get your dishes clean so long you use it correctly (because let’s face it, it’s just a dishwasher, it’s just a box where hot soapy water sloshes around your dishes and then gets rinsed off). What they meant was, Load it correctly and use it in timely fashion, and you’ll be fine. You can’t load the dishes, let them sit there for a month while you’re off gallivanting around Europe, and then come home and run the machine and expect calcified oatmeal and barbecue sauce to come off the dishes. Fortunately, most of us grasp this and I don’t think it’s a serious problem for most people. But just as loading the machine correctly is a crucial element of the process, unloading the dishwasher correctly is also important. It’s not as controversial a subject, but it is the final step of the “use your machine correctly” process. The onus is on the user to do the right thing. The dishwasher isn’t going to wag a finger at you and go “anh, anh, anh, bottom rack first!” The dishwasher has done its job as best it can. It is up to you, dishwasher-owner, to get the job done, and done right. You have to rely on your own good sense and your sense of process. As is the case with so many things in life: to have the best possible result, involving the least possible amount of backtracking, you have to figure out the right step A before going to step B.
And since I’ve laid it all out for you, it should be a goddamned snap. So go put your dishes away. Now. (Unless you’re my mother, in which case, I give up.)
This Old Hausfrau 
Leave a Reply