<story><title>Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)</title><url>https://www.whatlisacooks.com/blog/2015/5/8/dishwashing-detergent-hack-two-ingredients</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twic</author><text>I once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked.&lt;p&gt;Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i&amp;#x27;d expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won&amp;#x27;t work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean &lt;i&gt;chemically&lt;/i&gt;, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually &lt;i&gt;break food down&lt;/i&gt; over the course of tens of minutes or hours.&lt;p&gt;Dish soap does NOT do that. (It&amp;#x27;s also why you shouldn&amp;#x27;t wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that this &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; does &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it&amp;#x27;s just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn&amp;#x27;t break these things down. It&amp;#x27;s not meant to.&lt;p&gt;(Washing by hand with dish soap works because you&amp;#x27;re applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.)&lt;p&gt;I just don&amp;#x27;t find it credible that &amp;quot;the results are identical&amp;quot;. Either the author isn&amp;#x27;t paying enough attention, or else they&amp;#x27;re doing extensive &amp;quot;pre-washing&amp;quot; of their dishes before loading them, or they&amp;#x27;re washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry&amp;#x2F;harden in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>uberduber</author><text>We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.&lt;p&gt;Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren&amp;#x27;t getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren&amp;#x27;t really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.&lt;p&gt;My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)</title><url>https://www.whatlisacooks.com/blog/2015/5/8/dishwashing-detergent-hack-two-ingredients</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twic</author><text>I once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked.&lt;p&gt;Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i&amp;#x27;d expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won&amp;#x27;t work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean &lt;i&gt;chemically&lt;/i&gt;, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually &lt;i&gt;break food down&lt;/i&gt; over the course of tens of minutes or hours.&lt;p&gt;Dish soap does NOT do that. (It&amp;#x27;s also why you shouldn&amp;#x27;t wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t doubt that this &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; does &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it&amp;#x27;s just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn&amp;#x27;t break these things down. It&amp;#x27;s not meant to.&lt;p&gt;(Washing by hand with dish soap works because you&amp;#x27;re applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.)&lt;p&gt;I just don&amp;#x27;t find it credible that &amp;quot;the results are identical&amp;quot;. Either the author isn&amp;#x27;t paying enough attention, or else they&amp;#x27;re doing extensive &amp;quot;pre-washing&amp;quot; of their dishes before loading them, or they&amp;#x27;re washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry&amp;#x2F;harden in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wu_tang_chris</author><text>I lived in a co-op in PA during college, we had a &amp;quot;dish sanitizer&amp;quot; instead of a dish washer. It was basically just blasting the shit out of the dishes with crazy hot water. We were supposed to wash them before we put them in there but nobody ever did.</text></comment>