OK, I saw this thread when I went to look up a recipe in the index ... and I am so baffled that no one washes sifters. Mine is several years old and I ALWAYS wash it. It is an inexpensive metal one (less than $5) and it is not rusted. I rinse it out first with super-hot water, which will dissolve any leftover residue, wash it with hot soapy water, and follow with another super-hot water rinse. I let it air-dry after that and it's usually dry pretty quickly (within the next thirty minutes).
A LOT of stuff goes into that sifter -- flour, sugar, cocoa powder, spices, leavening, etc. etc. etc. -- and there is no way I would not clean it. You're always going to have some residue left over and if I'm making a white cake I don't want to have any cocoa or cinnamon in it! If I'm making two things at once that both need sifting and I skip washing in between, I am usually sorry, even after wiping it out with a dry paper towel first. There's just something wrong about white frosting that ends up with a mildly gray tinge like it is suffering from incipient cardiac arrest.
Plus, there is that "ew gross" factor. OK, yeah, so maybe only dry ingredients go into the sifter itself. But your grubby little hands are touching the handle and the sides. Even if you scrubbed them off with lye beforehand (and I am willing to bet NO ONE here washes her hands before adding each ingredient), your skin still has natural oils that will collect on the sifter, and if you store your sifter in with dry ingredients, that same stuff will be residing in with the flour or whatever. This is why you also don't (shouldn't) leave measuring cups/spoons sitting around in your dry ingredient bins.
You should also never get a sifter that has a layer in it where anything can get trapped (like hard little flour pellets). These are the kind where these is a top mesh layer and a bottom mesh layer, and in between the two layers is the sifter "blades", which are spun by squeezing the sifter handle. Mine only has one layer and it has a half wire hoop thing that I turn w/ a handle to sift everything through. Nothing ever gets permanently stuck in there! I also have a sieve, but I tend to only use it for smaller quantities since it's more time-consuming to do it that way.
OK, so maybe I seem like a germ freak, but I can't stand it when people don't wash stuff. I mean, yeah, so maybe all that's in the measuring cup is flour -- but you're handling the cup itself and most likely you're setting it down on a counter or some other surface that isn't terribly clean, so right there you should be washing it. When it comes to food preparation, you should always be safe and not sorry. There is nothing in my kitchen that does not get washed after use. Except, like, you know, the blender motor.
And remember -- just because your mother and your grandmother did it that way doesn't mean that it is right, or sanitary.
ugh, I am expressing a fervent opinion in which the word "sanitary" is used, I feel like such a reject now.
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jen
"It's one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle -- to get one's head cut off." -- LC
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am I the only washer out there???
