Perhaps someone familiar with Chemistry or living without a dishwasher can help me out.

I live in an older downtown apartment and like most small places in Portland it does not have a dishwasher. This means, obviously, that I do my dishes by hand. As someone who is starting to prepare a lot of chicken and other raw meat and is also generally growing more concerned with cleanliness in the kitchen, I am trying to figure out the best/most practical way to keep my sponges bacteria free; it feels like a disaster waiting to happen to not take serious preventative measures to disinfect them after cleaning up a cutting board used for chicken or red meat.

My thought was that I can clean the sponges out well after every use and then put them into a bucket under the sink that contains a bleach & water solution to make sure they stay clean. The problem is that my liquid dish soap (Ajax) warns that mixing with bleach may cause a dangerous chemical reaction; I am assuming this is because the dish soap contains ammonia.

My question is if I was to rinse and ring the sponges out very thoroughly after using the dish soap, and then put them into a solution that was 10% bleach & 90% water, would there still be enough of each chemical involved to make this a dangerous combination?

Thanks

I'm not sure routinely inhaling small amounts of chlorine is worth the benefit of having extra peace of mind about cross contamination.

Hot, soapy water and reasonable technique (separate cutting boards for raw meat, don't defrost at room temperature, etc.) should be enough to keep you from poisoning yourself.

Microwave them.
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/fo...-germs-sponges

I'm a chemist and yes you should be careful. To start, you only need about a .05% solution of bleach to adequately disinfect a sponge, probably less if you plan to store it in this solution. Most household bleach is around 5%, so dilute 1:100 with water. Then just be sure to rinse it out well before using or washing and you should be fine. Also, I'm sure you could find an ammonia-free dish soap.

You could also try washing them thoroughly and storing them in a ~2% acetic acid solution (about 1:1 vinegar and water). This would probably do the trick a little more safely if the smell doesn't bother you.

I'm in this camp as well. It's important to work cleanly, but there's no reason to be paranoid. Unless you've got a weak immune system, just having basic habits of cleanliness and safe food handling practices will take care of basically everything.

Something else to consider (although it may be hard depending on the available space) is to allow your dishes to air dry rather than towel drying them. Towels usually touch more things than you realize, and so they can pick up stuff that you're not aware of, which you will then spread to all of your cups, plates, and silverware.

There is some risk so avoiding the possibility of mixture is best if you are uncomfortable with your rinsing of the sponges.

The proper technique to rinse the sponges is to saturate with water, wring them out, resaturate, wring them out, etc. Three or four repetitions will lower the concentration of ammonia to a totally harmless level. Repeated rinsing is always far more effective than a single rinse.

The toxic gases are chloramine and hydrazine which are not good, so if you are at all shaky on your rinsing technique this is better off avoided.

BTW, I am not an expert in food safety but I did have a group of food scientists reporting to me in my last position and my memory is that they did not use sponges around meat products at all. Sponges and wooden cutting boards provide nice porous substrates for bugs to grow so you might want to rethink your cleaning approach.

On that note, I'm guessing if you leave all but the highest quality sponges in any solution for too long, they are likely to start breaking down. I don't know why, but when I first read the OP I imagined you were cooking chicken every day at a boarding school or something. Just use disposable SOS pads and make sure to use hot water and you'll live.

Yeah... Industrial kitchen settings play by a completely different set of rules. (I think they just throw away their sponges because it's not worth the effort to clean/sanitize them -- and I would guess that sponges only last a few days anyway.)

Don't use sponges?

Don't allow ammonia in the house.


PairTheBoard

Thanks a lot for the feedback, good insight here.

That is certainly an option, but in addition to no dishwasher there is no washer and dryer. If we just use dish rags we are still in a position where we can't reuse those until we wash them thoroughly. It's certainly not a big deal to use a new rag every day and then once a week wash them all at the laundry mat, but my hope was to find a way to avoid either (1)going through sponges like crazy, and (2) dirtying a bunch of rags that need to be washed each week.

What is your reasoning behind this? I don't know much about the chemical, but are you implying that even the amount in liquid dish soap should be avoided?

Thanks

I cook a lot of meats and i never have to cut them in any surface. They are already cut. Full chicken you can cut after boiling or baking (wash first of course but you do it in the sink while holding it and you never have it touch anything, then wash hands).

Seriously this is no problem. Why cant you simply avoid using any sponges at all directly to meat and blood remnants. Take the entire wooden board to the sink and rinse it and only then wash it with a spong that you use only for these purposes (so keep 2 sponges why not). The transfer after first already having rinsed it is tiny to none at all. Then the hot water and further soap will do it.


Do not be paranoid like that. Just avoid spreading raw meat in surfaces. There is no reason these days that all is already cut. Just wash it and cook it without touching any area (chicken pieces and steaks both can be rinsed with only cold water and then cooked)


And obviously realize that your immune system is strong anyway and that hot water can clean almost all of the issues in the visible sense and the sponge used several times with hot water and soap and then well rinsed and dried retains almost nothing, if you let it dry in another area that doesnt have standing water. Do not be paranoid like that. I have never poisoned myself. Just use common sense and minimize the contacts. No need to spread meat to other surfaces that is already in plastic bags or its own packaging. You can always let it rest if needed in a bowl that you then clean properly after first rinsing it heavily and then using sponges.

There are plenty of good reasons to want to cut meat at home. Portion control is better, the meat tastes better, and it usually costs less.

No, don't wash your meat before cooking it.

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Factsheets/...ty/index.asp#1

(And this comes from the people who tell you to cook beef roasts to 145 degrees.)