The Spoon Trick For Washing Your Sieve

There are tons of culinary uses for a sieve or fine mesh strainer. In addition to obvious tasks like straining foods or washing fruits and vegetables, you can use your sieve for more specialized tasks. Your sieve can be the key to pour-over coffee without a fancy setup, it can fill in as a flour sifter in a pinch, you can even use a sieve to steam pork buns. And that's just scratching the surface. The trouble is, while a sieve's unique structure — essentially a bowl of fine wire mesh — makes it very useful, it also makes it a real bear to clean. Or, at least, it did, before you started rinsing your sieve off the back of a spoon.

The trouble with cleaning a sieve is that, when you soap it up, all the little gaps in the mesh fill with suds, and rinsing it fully clean is a real challenge. It takes countless passes under the faucet to clear all that soap off. Even if your sink has a sprayer, it still pales in comparison to this simple hack of running the faucet over the back of a spoon. Water pouring from the faucet hits the spoon and spreads out in a dome shape. If you flip your sieve upside down, the water cascades perfectly over the spoon and down all sides of the strainer, rinsing it clean and saving you loads of time, energy, and water.

The shape of the water flow off the back of a spoon matches up perfectly with the curvature of the sieve, making this trick a real time-saver. But it's far from the only way to wash a sieve. Another simple trick is to use your hand to help water flow over every bit of the mesh, washing away soap and grime alike. For this method, hold the sieve right side up beneath the faucet and cup the bottom with your hand. The water passing through the sieve will hit your hand and spread, rinsing a much larger area. All you have to do is rotate the strainer around and it will be clean as a whistle in no time.

But, let's say you've made more of a mess. Maybe you weren't just rinsing fruit or sifting flour, but rather straining batter for lump-free crepes. In the joy of serving up breakfast, perhaps you even forgot to rinse the sieve right away, and now all that batter is caked on. The trick to deep-cleaning a fine mesh sieve, fortunately, is also an easy one. When all those little holes are crusted over, give it a soak in hot water mixed with distilled vinegar. After 15 minutes in there — or overnight, if it's a dire situation — your sieve should scrub up no problem. Just don't forget the spoon trick when it's time to rinse.