Dish towels get picked up thirty times a day and washed once a week, and they spend most of the time in between sitting damp. That combination is why a kitchen towel turns sour faster than anything else in a house, and why the cloth you dry a clean plate with is often the least clean thing on the counter.
Why damp is the whole problem
Dish towels are close to inert while they are dry. Very little happens in them and they can sit for days without changing.
A damp cloth is a different object entirely. Moisture, food residue and room temperature together produce the sour smell within a day, and often within an afternoon in a warm kitchen.
The number of times it has been used is almost beside the point. A cloth used twice and left bunched by a sink is in worse condition than one used ten times and spread out to dry after each.
Which is why the towel folded over an oven handle is the classic offender. The two faces are pressed together and the inside never dries at all.
The test is simple and it takes a second. If a cloth smells of anything while it is dry, it is overdue and no amount of rinsing it under a tap changes that.
The smell is the signal, and airflow is the answer before anything else in this article is.
Separating the jobs, which most kitchens do not
Four separate jobs get done with whatever cloth is closest to hand, and dish towels should not be sharing work with surface cloths.
A hand towel, for drying hands and nothing else.
A drying cloth, for washed dishes and glassware, which should be the cleanest one in the room.
A dishcloth, for washing up in the sink.
A surface cloth, for counters, spills, the front of the cooker and the floor. This is the dirtiest of the four and it should never touch a plate or a glass.
Use colour to keep them apart, because nobody remembers which is which otherwise. One colour per job, bought deliberately, and the system runs itself.
Mixing them is how food soil from a counter ends up on a dried plate, and separating them is the single change in this whole article with the largest effect.
How often to change dish towels
More often than feels reasonable, which is the honest answer.
Daily for the surface cloth and for the dishcloth, without thinking about it.
Every day or two for the drying cloth, and immediately any time it has gone properly wet rather than slightly damp.
Immediately after any contact with raw meat, poultry, fish or egg. That one has no exceptions and no version where the cloth gets rinsed out and carries on.
Immediately after it has been used on the floor, which is a job for a cloth that is going straight into the wash basket afterwards.
Own enough of them that changing one is not a decision. A stack of ten plain cotton cloths makes the habit possible, and two nice ones guarantee it fails.
A used cloth waiting for laundry day should be spread out somewhere to dry, not thrown wet into a basket where it sours and passes the smell to everything it is touching.
Washing dish towels hot and on their own
Dish towels tend to get thrown in with bath towels or with clothing, and they should have their own load.
Food soil, cooking fat and whatever came off a counter are not things to be moving into a shirt, and the load is small enough that it is easy to keep separate.
Hot water. This is one of the loads where the hot setting is genuinely the right one, because the soil is largely fat and it needs heat to release from the fibre.
A full dose of ordinary detergent, and a scoop of oxygen bleach for white and pale cloths, which lifts tea, coffee and food staining without weakening cotton the way chlorine bleach does.
No fabric softener, and this matters more on kitchen cloths than on anything else in the house. Softener leaves a water repelling film on the fibre, and a towel that repels water has lost the only function it has.
No dryer sheets either, for exactly the same reason. A cloth that pushes water around a plate instead of taking it up has been ruined by something added on purpose.
The greasy ones, and the pre soak they need
Dish towels used on a hob, a pan or a roasting tin are carrying cooking fat, and cooking fat does not come out of terry loops in a normal cycle.
It stays in the fibre and goes rancid instead, which produces a specific stale smell that survives a wash and comes back the instant the cloth gets wet again.
The fix is a pre soak. The hottest water the cloth allows, with a degreasing dish soap or a scoop of washing soda in it, for an hour or overnight.
Then wash hot as normal afterwards. The soak does the lifting and the cycle carries it away.
If the stale smell returns on a cloth that has been through this twice, the fat is still in there and is not coming out. That cloth is finished as a kitchen cloth.
Wiping heavy grease with paper first, before any cloth touches it, prevents most of this and takes no longer.
Why they go stiff, and how to strip them
Dish towels go stiff for reasons that have nothing to do with wear. Stiffness is buildup, and there are two things building up.
The first is mineral from the water, which deposits in the loops of the terry and turns them hard and scratchy. The second is detergent that never fully rinsed out, which does the same thing and holds smell as well.
Fabric softener adds a third layer on top, and people usually reach for more softener when cloths go stiff, which makes the whole thing worse rather than better.
To strip them, run a hot cycle with no detergent at all and half a cup of washing soda. Then run a second hot cycle with a cup of white vinegar and nothing else, in a separate cycle rather than the same one, because the two cancel each other out if they meet.
Then wash normally, using about half the detergent you had been using. Cloths come out of that noticeably softer and considerably more absorbent, with nothing added to them.
Going forward, less detergent and an extra rinse keeps it from coming back.
Drying properly, and when to retire one
Dry dish towels completely, which is the step that gets skipped and the one that decides everything.
A dryer on medium is fine and it is the fastest route, and the tumbling lifts the loops back up so the cloth comes out more absorbent than it went in.
On a rail, spread them out flat and open, one cloth per rail. Folded over a rail dries the outer face and leaves the inner face damp for hours, which is the whole problem restated.
A rail beats a hook every time, because a hook holds fabric against fabric at the point where the moisture is.
Never fold or stack a cloth that is not completely dry. A stack of slightly damp towels develops a smell through the whole pile, and then the whole pile has to be stripped.
Retire one when it stops taking up water, when it sheds lint across glassware, when it stays stiff after a proper strip, or when the sour smell comes back within a day of washing. Cut it into quarters and it has a second life as a rag.
The Midvale part
Water here is hard, and hardness is the direct reason dish towels in this area go stiff, grey and unabsorbent faster than they should.
The mechanism is straightforward. Calcium and magnesium in the water react with detergent and form an insoluble film, and that film settles into the loops of a terry cloth and stays there. It is slightly sticky, so it holds onto food soil and onto smell, and it builds a little more with every wash until the cloth feels like card.
So stripping on a schedule matters more here than it does in a soft water area. Every couple of months, run the washing soda cycle and the vinegar cycle described above, and in between use a slightly larger detergent dose than a soft water household would, though not double, and add an extra rinse so the film has a chance to leave rather than settling back down.
The dry air is the half of this that works in your favour, and it makes the most important habit here easy. A cloth spread open on a rail in this climate is dry in a fraction of the time the same cloth would take in a humid one, and through winter, with indoor heating pulling the last of the moisture out of the air, it is faster still. That means drying fully between uses, which is the whole ballgame, costs nothing but the two seconds it takes to spread a cloth out instead of folding it over a rail.
Where a load of kitchen cloths gets its own hot cycle
Kitchen cloths want hot water, a lot of it, and a drum that nothing else has been through first.
The machines at our self-service laundry on West 7200 South run a properly hot cycle with the water volume it takes to rinse dissolved fat and mineral film back out of terry loops, rather than leaving it behind in the fabric to set into the stiffness that made you strip them in the first place.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Our wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a laundry basics guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
Dish towels are used constantly and spend most of their life damp, and damp rather than the number of uses is what makes them sour. Keep four separate cloths, one each for hands, drying dishes, washing up and surfaces, in four colours so nobody mixes them. Change the surface cloth and dishcloth daily, the drying cloth every day or two, and any of them immediately after raw meat or the floor. Wash hot, separately from clothing, with no fabric softener, since softener destroys absorbency. Pre soak greasy cloths in hot water with dish soap. Strip mineral buildup with washing soda then vinegar in separate cycles. Dry fully, spread open rather than folded.
WaveMAX Midvale is at 48 West 7200 South, easy to reach from Midvale and the surrounding area. If you have bedding that will not fit at home, call us at 385-557-4665.