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Comment by tastysandwich | Hacker News Reader

> and she worked out that cooking salmon in a dishwasher does not bring it up to a food safe temperature.

That video was great! Although I notice she cooks it in a large jar of water. I suspect that it would take a long time to heat up all that water, hence it never reaches 62°C. Whereas if you just wrapped it in foil, it might transfer that heat to the fish much quicker.

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Yeah, I think the key take away would be, if you do cook salmon in a dishwasher, in foil or in a jar, the first time you do it use a heat probe and graph to confirm it goes into the bacteria killing hot-zone for the correct amount of time. She also mentions heat resistant spores, so it should be eaten as soon as it comes out of your dishwasher. Once you’ve done one run and confirmed it’s ok, I expect you don’t need to do the temperature probe the next time.

The second key takeaway is that you probably don’t want to cook your fish in the dishwasher at all.

You do not need to cook salmon to any temperature. They don’t inherently have food-borne pathogens. People eat it raw. Most salmon-related illnesses come from processed salmon (like smoked) where cross contamination introduces listeria.

Also, most bacteria actually begin to die at around 130F, which her chart I think shows it gets well above. (It looks like it gets into the low 60s, which is well above that.)

Also I’m pretty sure the only food-borne pathogen that forms spores is clostridium botulinum, and that’s not found in fish.

Also, its very important to run your sink to full hot temp prior to starting the washer. (in 99% of dishwashers, they pull from the hotwater supply to the kitchen sink. Dishwashers will do a ~15 minute pre-spray (without soap) initial rinse. If you dont pre-warm the sink line, then the dishwasher will start with a cold pre-wash, thus will not put dishes to temp as quickly in the cycle.

That is probably regional. Here they are most commonly connected to the cold water line.

Yup, pretty sure all UK/European dishwashers pull from the cold tap.

Modern energy efficient dishwashers only reach 50 °C. And they also take three or four hours, which makes this idea even less appetizing.

Y'all with your fancy 220v electricity can get it hot a lot faster. In America where your dishwasher can only pull 1,800 w you have to hook it up to hot water.

I believe most modern dishwashers simply sense the incoming water temp though and basically just pump the water through until they get to hot water.

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