Many years ago I worked as a skivvy in a hotel kitchen. We never used any detergent for the crockery, it just used extremely hot water. The dishes seemed very clean and they dried very rapidly.
How... many... years ago? When I started cooking professionally in the 80s three-stage hand wash had already been required by health codes everywhere for decades. I've seen all kinds of shit but every kitchen at least has the setup and chemicals for that for health inspections if nothing else. In practice even the sketchiest restaurants will have quats even if they only fill it once a day.
GP is talking about a commercial dishwasher. You can't hand wash hot enough -- you'd get serious burns. So anything you hand wash needs the three-stage wash, rinse, sanitize process with detergent and chemical sanitizer.
Yep. If the water is hot enough you don't need chemical detergent or sanitizer. But we're talking about water that is almost boiling -- you'd only find dishwashers that hot in a commercial kitchen.
I wonder if the sanitize button on a residential unit is good enough. (The machines in the article are pressurized, but that is a new technology. The GP post’s machines were probably older.)
