Rack, Mat, Or Tea Towel: What To Dry Dishes On

The question is where the water goes

Dishes dry by evaporation regardless of what they sit on. What differs between the three options is what happens to the water that runs off them, and that is the entire difference in outcome.

A rack sends it somewhere. A towel holds it and slowly releases it. A mat holds it and traps it against a flat surface, which is the one arrangement where it does not leave at all.

The mat is the one to be careful with

A microfibre drying mat is quiet, it takes no space, and the underside is pressed against a counter for most of the day. That is a surface that stays damp continuously, and after a few weeks a mat lifted for the first time usually smells and sometimes has a dark bloom on the counter under it.

If you use one, hang it up between uses rather than leaving it flat, and wash it every few days at a temperature that means something. Used that way it is fine. Left in place, it is the worst of the three by a wide margin, and the mark it can leave on a laminate counter does not always come out.

The rack, and the parts of it that need cleaning

• The tray underneath is the item, not the rack. It holds a shallow layer of water more or less permanently and it goes slimy quietly.
• The drip spout, if it has one, gets a film inside that a cloth cannot reach and a bottle brush can.
• The feet, which sit in whatever collected under them.
• The joints of a coated wire rack, where the coating cracks first and the wire underneath then rusts.
• The counter under the whole thing, which never gets wiped because the rack is always on it.
• Wooden racks look better and need more: they take water into the grain and eventually go black at the joints.

Empty and wash the tray twice a week, which takes a minute, and move the whole rack when you wipe the counter. Those two habits are most of what keeps a rack from becoming the dirtiest object in the kitchen.

The tea towel version

Laying dishes on a folded towel works perfectly well, and it is the right answer in a kitchen with almost no counter, since the towel disappears afterwards and a rack does not.

The condition is that it gets hung up to dry once the dishes are away, and that it is a towel used for this and nothing else. A towel left flat on the counter under dry dishes is doing the same thing a mat does, and the fact that it looks dry on top is not informative.

Choosing between them

• Daily cooking and enough counter space: a rack with a tray, emptied twice a week.
• Very little counter: a tea towel, hung after each use, in rotation with a second one.
• A dishwasher that does most of the work: a small rack or a towel for the few items that stay out.
• Hard water: a rack, since dishes standing in a puddle on a mat spot far worse.
• A kitchen with poor ventilation: a rack, and not a mat, since anything trapping damp will be slower to dry.
• A shared kitchen: a rack, because it is the only one of the three that other people can see needs emptying.

The small habits that matter more than the choice

Shake each item before it goes down, which removes more water than the next hour of standing does. Stand bowls and mugs at an angle rather than flat, so they drain instead of holding a pool. Put things away once they are dry rather than using the rack as storage, since a full rack stops the air moving and everything takes twice as long.

The sink area and what stands in it are on every visit in the cleaning checklist. A tray that has been left too long is deep apartment cleaning territory, and recurring apartment cleaning keeps that corner from getting there.