A dishwasher is a very helpful thing in your kitchen. Cleaning all the staff in the kitchen is not so easy task. But still, not everything can or should go in the dishwasher. The kitchen tool you probably use every single day, as your knife. It’s expensive, it’s precious, and your dishwasher is slowly killing it. So you have to be careful before putting everything in the dishwasher, at least you should know which kitchen tool shouldn’t go in the dishwasher.
What Happens To Your Knife When You Put This In A Dishwasher:
In a wash cycle first, the knife has to contend with the heat and humidity. This is obviously not good for your knife. Experts say that the high temperature and moisture of the dishwasher can seriously damage both the steel and the handle. If your blade is carbon steel or has a wood handle, then the temperature and the moisture will especially damage your knife. Do you ever put your wooden spoon in the dishwasher? You don’t right? Similarly, if your knife handle is wooden, you shouldn’t put it in the dishwasher.
Now another problem is the turbulence of the dishwasher.
The water jets in the dishwasher can cause the knife to knock into whatever else you have in the dishwasher. It can damage the edge of your knife. It’s a good way to ruin your knife quickly. And if you have ceramic knives, they are at even greater risk, because they are very brittle. Only one cycle can chip the blade or snap it in two.
Then comes the detergents, which can be just as dangerous as the machine itself. It causes the knives to dull or discolor.
Finally, if you don’t think about your knives, at least you need to concern about everything else that goes in the dishwasher, including your fingers when you’re unloading. Sometimes you have to clean the knives that are bigger in shape. Like the meat cleaver or brisket knife. When you put these types of a knife in the dishwasher it can harm the other tools given in the dishwasher.
It can scratch your plates, cups, or any other ceramic material, and even the actual machine. If you point them down, they can damage utensil baskets; and if you point them up, you risk an injury.
How Should You Wash Your Knives:
As you cannot put your knives in the dishwasher, so the question arise how should you wash them.
If you want to keep your knife last long, you have to clean it in a proper way. For most knives, hand-washing in hot or soapy water will do the best or even just hot water. Hot water means just normal tap water. Not boiling water.
Sometimes our knives get messed up and we need to clean it with soap, but to keep the knife better I will prefer to add oil with it.
Other Ways To Ruin Your knives:
There are some other things that can ruin your knife.
- Storing your knives unsheathed in the utensil drawer.
Why this is bad? Yeah, there are some reasons behind it. First of all, it’s not safe to keep a knife loose in the drawer. The next and the major reason is an unsheathed knife rub against other things, which causes it to get dull very quickly. The best way to keep your knives is on a magnetic knife strip or in a knife block.
If you’re really don’t have enough space and need to store those knives in a drawer, you can just simply slip them into a blade guard first.
- Sliding your knife, blade down, across the cutting board to clear away the things you just-chopped.
This is really a bad habit which ruins your knife. After you’ve got a pile of chopped veggies, you scrape your nice, sharp knife and blade down right across the cutting board to clear some space. It’s a terrible way to treat your blade and you know that.
It has a simple solution. All you need to do is just flip the knife over before you slide. In this way, the flat spine side does the clearing, and you don’t ruin your blade.
So here are some tips to keep your knife longlasting. I hope this will help you to take good care of your most necessary kitchen tools.