The worktop’s wiped, the dishwasher’s humming and the tea towel is back on the oven door. It looks finished. It isn’t, quite, because a kitchen looks clean a good while before it is, and the things still carrying bacteria are usually the ones you touched last.
What gets rid of them is heat and drying. A spray does its job on a flat worktop, but most of what survives in a kitchen sits in damp cloth, in knife grooves and in rubber seals, and a scented wipe doesn’t get into any of those.
The chopping board
Run a thumb across a plastic board that’s seen a few years of onions. Once your nail catches in the grooves, the board is past cleaning. Every cut has become a channel that a sponge glides over and a hot wash never reaches the bottom of, so that’s the day to replace it.
Until then, your board goes straight into a hot dishwasher cycle after raw meat or fish, or a scrub in water too hot to keep your hands in, then stand it on its edge. A board left flat on the rack keeps a wet underside for hours. Wooden boards want the same, plus a wipe of oil once a month.
Bottles, lunchboxes and lids
Your reusable bottle lives in a bag all day and gets a rinse at night. Its lid has a rubber gasket, a fold-down straw or a spout, and none of them come clean under a tap. Pull the gasket out once a week and have a look at the line underneath it.
Your dishwasher misses these parts too. Water doesn’t get up a straw or under a seal that’s still seated in its groove, so the parts come apart before they go in, and they dry apart afterwards, overnight, on a towel.
Heat is the other route for small rubbery things. Compact steam appliances such as the AURA & IGGI are built for objects of exactly this size: a bottle teat, a toothbrush head, a lunchbox seal, anything too awkward for a dishwasher jet to reach and too small to scrub. Whichever way you do it, the pieces stay apart until every surface is dry to the touch.
Tea towels and sponges
The tea towel does more jobs in a day than anything else in the room. It dries the plates, wipes a hand after the chicken, mops a spill by the kettle and goes back on its hook still damp. Damp cloth in a warm kitchen is about the best home a bacterium could ask for.
The Food Standards Agency watched real households cook and saw a tea towel or cloth doing several jobs during one meal in five. Its advice for homes is to change or wash tea towels, sponges and cloths at least once a week. A towel that’s touched raw meat goes in the wash that evening.
Sponges never fully dry. Squeeze yours hard after use, stand it on its end, and bin it the day it starts to smell.
The fridge door seal
Open your fridge and fold the rubber seal back with a finger. The fold hides crumbs, a smear of something that dripped months ago, and a film nobody wipes because the door is always shut on it. An old toothbrush and hot soapy water do it in ten minutes; a narrow steam nozzle run slowly along the fold reaches the corners a brush bends away from. Dry the seal afterwards, or it sticks and tears. There’s more on the parts of a house that hide their dirt in our cleaning section.
