Dishwashing/Techniques

Scraping
Unless your dish pit or sink is specifically equipped to handle it, all food or significant debris should be removed from the items before any water is used. To do this manually, simply scrape the debris into a trash bin, taking care not to brush any sharp edges against yourself. This ensures kitchen sponges and other cleaning items will not become saturated with debris and grease.

Hand Washing
The classic form of dishwashing. Fully hand washing isn't efficient in either time or resource use. However hand washing plays an important role. Light handwashing prior to entry into a machine can double as an inspection, to help ensure that the machine isn't given an item it can't clean.

Hand washing also plays another important role, if no dishwashing machine is present or operational, it becomes the only option for dishwashing.

Soaking
Sometimes it is desirable to soak items in cleaning liquid and/or water to help release some of the debris firmly attached to the items. By letting items soak for a while, it may become easier to clean them. This is useful when there is a large volume of items with few to no additional hands, allowing more efficient use of time. That said soaking is not a substitute for actually cleaning an item.

For cleaning especially dirty dishes like hardened layers of fat or similar, soaking in hot water may help to melt the remains, allowing them to be scraped easily.