My first move was to question my two London-based friends. “Do people in the UK really not rinse the soap off their dishes?” I texted. The native Brit replied, “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t wash the suds off.” The American expat said, “I’ve had more experiences of tasting dish soapy flavors in food than ever before here.”
So I asked Maki Yazawa, a staff writer on Wirecutter’s kitchen team, if she had ever heard of such a thing before. “I personally always rinse the soap off,” she said. “However, in the restaurant industry, you’ll often see three-compartment sinks, where you wash the dishes in the first section with hot, soapy water, then rinse them with warm water in the second before sanitizing them in a chemical-based solution as the last step. You typically don’t rinse off the sanitization liquid from there, and your dishes are ready to use after they air dry. So maybe they’re actually on to something?”
Of course, restaurants are running through dishes faster than the average home cook. In my kitchen, I’ll scrub each dish with hot water and a soapy sponge, and then rinse it and leave it to dry. Lots of people also swear by submerging dirty dishes in a sink full of hot water and soap, cleaning them one by one, and then rinsing and allowing them to dry.
As far as I was aware, those were the only two methods that people employed for dishwashing, but according to the myriad videos on TikTok, not rinsing your dishes after washing them is certainly not a novel concept. And I can’t lie—there’s something appealing about the idea of skipping a whole step along the way.