The season is pretty durable there isn’t much that can straight up grind it off. Scotch bright pads work good. Those chainmail scrubbers. A nylon bristled brush. Coarse salt works excellently as well, mixed with oil.
That’s not really a grill brush in the usual sense. Those tend to have wire bristles. And wire bristles are among the sorts of things that can grind off the season. Sand paper. Steel wool. Wire brushes.
Not with everything else…
If we were living in The Future as promised by the 1950s, the Housewife of Tomorrow could probably just pop the sponges in the household’s convenient and sanitary Cobalt-60 sterilization system; but no such luck in our case.
I read that article when it came out because i love sponges and have played with micrwaving and bleaching methods. I find both methods work fine. The source study writeup was heavy on the microbiology and strong on lab technique for testing the presence of bacteria, but seriously lacked rigor in the sponge cleaning methods. It seemed like it was all self reported, and it was hazy from section to section which methods had been used and how rigorously. I was left unimpressed, and my methods for removing sponge stank unchanged.
You do your own microbial testing?
The goal of this article was to look at how these cleaning methods work in the wild, not in the lab. If you go to pubmed and look at articles on the topic which do the cleaning in controlled conditions, you’ll find that even those where the microwaving/dishwashing does reduce the bacteria report only partial effectiveness, maybe half an order of magnitude (which seems pretty good, but that still means plenty of potentially deadly microbes on the sponge).
We both dishwash and microwave (and sometimes bleach) our sponges, but in light of articles like these we also tend to throw them out much sooner than we used to.
Well the NYX may disapprove, but it gets the stink out for me.
I know sponges are full of germs, but I use mine for 3, sometimes 4 weeks and then chuck them in the washing machine with the towels. I’ve never had food poisoning in my life. So I wonder how much the bacterial load translates to people ingesting the bacteria and then getting sick.
Xeni, Mark, Cory and I all blog kitchen stuff. Mark may be most frequent, but I’m no slouch.
You’re the most likely to post gear compatible with a VW camper kitchen. A previously underserved market.
I’m in the pocket of big camper van.
It’ll cost you an arm.
Challenge accepted.
The bright blue glow shows it’s working.
Oh, you mean 
That’s weird, instead of the word being censored, it got bigger and more noticeable.
If you use these to wipe your dishes, what do you use to clean your counters?
Is there an Eye of Fatima on the wall of the hotel room?
That is sort of the missing link in all these “sponges are dirty!” articles. Sure they’re full of germs. You’re full of germs too. Everything is. The question is more are those dangerous germs. And how often does a dirty sponge translate to actually spreading or causing illness.
I’m willing to bet that the answers there are the germs are largely innocuous. And that they seldom lead to spreading disease around without specific contamination (like said salmonella from raw chicken). If the nuker is sufficient to kill the stink and prevent such contamination from being spread (which I’m willing to bet it is) fine. Who cares what else lives on the sponge. Literally every other surface in the kitchen is teaming with life. The water you use to clean up is teaming with life. Why should the sponge not be? Is there a practical reason a kitchen sponge needs to be sterile?
I’ve had food poisoning a bunch. Not once could it be traced back to my sponge.
If your cast iron is properly seasoned, a typical sponge isn’t going to do anything to it. The whole idea is that you’ve created a strong polymer on its surface. I soap and scrub my cast iron and have zero issues. See here: “The Truth About Cast Iron Pans: 7 Myths That Need To Go Away”
I don’t want to encourage them shilling overpriced crap. They do enough of that already.
Over the years most of the studies/articles have focused on e coli, which is not too dangerous if you’re already a coprophile, though most of us who aren’t would probably do well to minimize the exposure as much as possible. The article I posted above is mainly about Moraxella osloensis, which is mainly dangerous if you have a compromised immune system or an irrational dislike of Norwegians. However, increasingly the studies have been finding concentrations of Campylobacter and the like, so hardly innocuous.
Well, if they shilled their wonderful things (as is thematic for the site) but we didn’t have to buy them from the overpriced outlets, I wouldn’t mind this as a way of subsidizing the site.
I just bought one of these sponges (from the $1/apiece location) in order to give it a shot.
