Clean kitchen while you cook
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- January 20, 2024
- 430
It was a rule Julia Child followed faithfully, and we all should do the same: clean as you go. Leaving a trail of greasy pans and food splatters, blobs of butter on the counter next to sauce-covered spoons, and a floor littered with garlic peels and ripped off plastic bag tops is the big reason so many people find cooking to be a tiresome, overwhelming chore. It also must be the source of more than a few couple spats.
A lovely fellow at church once told me his wife of many years professed to love his cooking, but he wasn’t allowed to do so anymore because she tired of cleaning up the kitchen after his creative sprees.
I tasted some of the dishes he made, serious things from the southern coast that were truly delicious, so the messes must have been horrific for her to banish him from the kitchen outright.
You can watch Julia’s many cooking shows, and right from the beginning, she has a towel in hand constantly wiping up spills and keeping her workspace clean. Clean as you go makes the process of preparing any meal of any size much, much easier.
Last week, just as the temperature dipped below 20 outside, I made stroganoff, a favorite we hadn’t eaten in a couple of years. While I wanted to use the surprisingly cheap sirloin I’d found at the store, my wife wanted hers with chicken. Proper stroganoff requires three pans at once: one for the meat, one for the mushroom sauce and one for noodles. The request for chicken upped this pan count to four, using all four burners.
By the time we were ready to eat, all the utensils and all four pans were washed and put away or in the dishwasher. Before I started slicing all the ingredients, I filled the kitchen sink with hot soapy water and made sure my counter sponge was ready to go.
We’ve bought bar towels in bulk and always have a few clean ones at hand also. As soon as something was finished cooking, I washed the pan. I mopped up spills right away, put away ingredients no longer needed, and got knives into the sink and scrubbed as soon as I finished with them.
I use stroganoff as an illustration because it can make a dickens of a mess if you don’t keep up cleaning as you go. Imagine returning from eating to find four or five dirty pans in the sink, spilled salt on the counter, tasting spoons sitting in goop and sharp, messy knives, all needing washed up before you can settle on the sofa with a nice chardonnay. I wouldn’t want to cook in that scenario either.
A part of cleaning as you go returns to the source of all successful cooking: preparation. Stroganoff requires slices of meat, onions, mushrooms and garlic. I did all of that up front, collected everything in bowls so they’d be ready to go, and gathered the other ingredients and measured them out.
Once all that was done, I cleaned up the small mess all that slicing created and put away the knife and cutting board. Cleaning as you go also helps you be vigilant for dumb mistakes that can make you sick. Dispensing with messy cutting boards from slicing raw chicken right away prevents cross contamination with other ingredients. If you leave all that sitting, you may forget and start chopping vegetables in the same space the chicken vacated 10 minutes ago. Washing sharp knives and putting them away immediately means it won’t be sitting on the counter for a long time waiting to be knocked to the floor and into your foot.
Any time you have a pause while waiting for something to brown or boil or thicken, take a quick look around the kitchen for things you can pop into the dishwasher or give a quick scrub. Catch the small spills along the way and they’re happily off your radar.
Doing these things requires very little additional effort and saves tension, anxiety and grumpiness later. And your housemate won’t want to banish you from ever cooking again.