Vegetables are grown in dirt
Wash your food
An effective fruit and vegetable wash is a necessary kitchen accessory.
You definitely want to make sure you clean off all of the soil from your fruits and vegetables, but you definitely don't want any soap residue or chemical odors left on your food. The reason you cook is to have great tasting food that's good for you too.
Chickens step in poop sometimes
Farm Fresh Eggs
Fruit and vegetable wash also works beautifully on your farm fresh eggs.
Farm fresh eggs are the very best, but even chickens like to take a bath in dirt and dust. Sometimes, someone likes to sleep in the nest box . They poop in their sleep and then someone lays an egg before I've had a chance to clean the nest box.
Store / factory farm eggs are a totally different story. Those sad chickens live in dirty conditions. The eggs are washed and "pasturized", meaning lightly irradiated, to kill pathogens. That also removes the protective egg bloom, leaving the shell exposed to transport and grocery store pathogens.
In any case, it's always best to wash an egg with soap and water before cracking it open. This makes sure the precious egg inside remains uncontaminated.
If Instant Liquid Soap is good enough to clean eggs, you can clean your stovetop with it too
Lettuce is grown in good dirt
Wash lettuce well
The best way to clean lettuce, especially fresh picked lettuce:
Make sure you wash it well before dressing up your salads. When you buy lettuce in the store, that's been packed in plastic packaging, it's already been washed a few times, with water from a questionable source. Fresh picked organic lettuce, is dirty.
Fill a bowl with drinking water and add 1 drop of Instant Liquid Soap. Rinse the lettuce in this water.
Dump the dirty water, fill your bowl with clean drinking water again.
This time do not add the 1 drop of Instant Liquid soap. Rinse the lettuce a 2nd time. Repeat this step one more time and your lettuce should be ready for your salad plate.
a great fruit and vegetable wash
How to use
I use the Instant Liquid soap at full strength as a fruit and vegetable wash and wash them just like I'll wash a dish.
I scrub root vegetables like potatoes, especially if I want to eat the skins. Carrots, celeriac, turnips, etc. Zucchinis, cucumbers, and winter squashes many times grow laying on the ground, tomatoes have the fine green dust, eggs can have dirt or small microscopic amounts of poop, melons which will harbor tiny bits of dirt in the crevices, eggplants will have mud splatters.
One drop of Instant Liquid Soap
Castile Soap
For other fruits and vegetables, the fruit and vegetable wash is a small amount of liquid soap diluted in a bowl of water to rinse off excess dirt.
Leafy greens, lettuces, beens, cabbages, and the like simply need a rinse and a tiny bit of soap will take care of any pathogens. I'll rinse these types of foods under running drinking water with soapy hands or dip in a bowl of water with literally 1 drop of soap in it, and then rinse again.
Instant Liquid Soap is versatile. You can clean your whole kitchen with it.
Fruit and vegetable peels
peels and rinds
It's a good idea to really wash your fruits and vegetables, even if you are going to peel them, so no dirt touches the yummy food that you will eat.
I sometimes use the peels separately from the rest of the fruit or vegetable. For instance, I like to peel my tomatoes for sauce, but make sure I've washed off the green dust so my chickens can enjoy my scraps. The green tomato dust is toxic to them.
I'll use carrot peelings as weights when fermenting vegetables.
Fill a bowl with water. Add 1 drop of diluted Instant Liquid Soap, and soak your vegetable peelings so they are pathogen free for fermenting. One little speck of dirt can contaminate a whole batch of fermenting vegetables.
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Instant Liquid Soap is so versatile, it can clean everything in your kitchen. Dishes, food, the floor, and the windows.
Stop displacing water and dilute natural liquid soap at home.