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Dishwasher guide: salt will harm the stainless steel lining. What about salt water in stainless steel pots? (mander.xyz)

submitted 9 months ago by plantteacher@mander.xyz to c/chemistry@mander.xyz

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The manual for my dishwasher says to refill salt just before running a wash cycle, because if any grains of salt spill onto the stainless steel interior it will corrode. If it runs right away, no issue because the salt is quickly dissolved, diluted, and flushed.

So then I realized when I cook pasta I heavily salt the water (following the advice that pasta water should taste as salty as the ocean). But what happens when I leave that highly salty brine in a pot, sometimes for a couple days to reuse it? Does that risk corroding the pots?

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[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Starchy water sitting around is a breading ground for bacteria. Don’t do that.

That water is brine, if you do it right. Salt is a good preservative. I’ve tested it with up to 2 reuses.

Also, dishwashers don’t clean with salt water. They use the salt to reset their internal water softener.

Not sure why you thought I thought dishwashers clean with salt water. The manual’s advice was to mitigate salt grains that did not get into the salt reservoir that would sit on the stainless steel potentially for days.

[–] rImITywR@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Brine is the exact condition that life needs/thrives in. "About as salty as the ocean" is really good at supporting microbial growth. Source

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

i get 403 forbidden w/that link. And archive.org chokes on it too for some reason. Does your source counter this source?

(edit) ah, I see the problem. Salt only works as a preservative by drying out food.

[–] stom@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Life started in the ocean, so logically this makes no sense.

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz -2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Actually that logic is broken IMO. A food preservative need not make life impossible for all organisms. E.g. hops (and consequential acidity) preserves beer to some extent by making life hard for some unwanted organisms. But hops do not kill everything (of course, because you intend to drink the beer). Beer can still spoil despite the hops.

But as I said in my correction, salt works as a preservative through a drying effect, which I did not previously realize (TIL).

[–] stom@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So you thought leaving food waste in brine was safe because it would only kill the bad bacteria?

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

If you read the whole thread, I would not have to spell this out. These are preservatives (source):

honey
salt
garlic
sugar
ginger
sage
rosemary
sage
mustard
mustard seed
cumin
black pepper
turmeric
cinnamon
cardamom
cloves
vinegar
citric acid
lemon/lime juice

They generally work by killing/repelling/deterring microbes that to a notable extent happen to be of the unwanted variety. Before yesterday, I thought salt worked similarly to the others on that list. Yesterday I learnt that salt is uniquely functions as a preservative due to a different mechanism (a drying effect).

Your logic is nonsense. To claim that because substance X does not kill /everything/, it cannot serve as a preservative -- this is broken logic that you brought to the thread. Nothing on that list of food preservatives kills or deters every microbe - not even every harmful microbe. Of course they selectively mitigate /some of/ “the bad bacteria” (but note it’s a bit straw mannish for you to use the article “the” in your phrasing imply /all/ unwanted microbes). Most preservatives mitigate enough unwanted microbes without unacceptable overkill to beneficial microbes to justify use as a preservative. They are selected as preservatives for this reason. Foods that fail to significantly select against unwanted microbes (i.e. most foods) don’t get tagged as a preservative. How are you not grasping this?

You also have noteworthy bad assumption: that evolution does not happen outside of the ocean. The claim that because life started in the ocean, the ocean is therefore suitable for everything -- this is bogus. Try putting a freshwater fish in the ocean. If a complex organism can evolve to become intolerant to the environment of its ancestors, why wouldn’t microbes also evolve to develop intolerances?

[–] stom@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Blah blah blah... Dude, just clean your damned dishes. Whatever you copy paste from articles it seems pretty obvious that leaving out food waste to reuse it is a pretty bad idea.