Preparing For Pesach Teleconference Day 2 - Kashering Microwaves, Sinks, and Countertops

this torah class is brought to you by torahanytime.com okay good afternoon everyone we continue our series on preparing the kitchen for pesach we began yesterday if anybody missed yesterday's teleconference it's posantaranitam.com yesterday we spoke about a few important yanim we spoke about warming drawers we spoke about the need to get a new urn we spoke about the three methods of conjuring so we're going to continue today um a few people forward me from different chats the different things that i was quoted to have saying which i did not so please listen carefully again just to make sure that you heard correctly um we're going to speak today about uh we're going to begin with microwaves now microwaves is a big controversy well whether one can uh contour a microwave for pesach especially in light of the fact that yesterday we mentioned that we are mahmoud like motion not to capture plastic there are uh artistrol deco playskim who say you could but we're going to go like gravemicia that we don't capture plastic so that's an issue for a microwave most microwaves the interior is plastic but nevertheless even though we may basically maintain that not to cast your plastic but a microwave we could be lenient and the reason is because the food is not really being heated up by the interior of the microwave in fact the interior of a microwave may not even get hot at all unless food splatters on it but that's not the method of of it cooking it's basically cooked with electro waves obviously a microwave you can use on shabbos or yumpta anyway but we're dealing with hula might now so a microwave we will allow capturing a microwave for pesach and it will be cautious similar to many of the things that we're going to mention and that is it's going to be cleaned out very well you're going to wait 24 hours you're going to take a cup of water or a bowl of water you're going to fill it up to the top and you're going to let it boil for an extended time until the whole chamber of the microwave fills up with steam and the water overflows now there are a few issues here um one issue is if there's a glass plate the glass we said cannot be cautious for a pesach and therefore you remove the glass plate before capturing and put it away for pesach um if the microwave has a porcelain a nano uh enamel interior then we're not gonna be able to caster it for pesach but again most microwaves have either a plastic interior or a metal interior so we'll allow capturing it again you're going to clean it out you're going to boil water for let's say um 10-15 minutes until the whole microwave is full of um we'll say 10 minutes until the whole microwave is full with steam and it boils over and that will be a valid way to kosher it's still considered ideal if you're going to use your microwave on pesach to cover all the food in the microwave and then you're basically good to go so if you're gonna costure and you're gonna cover so that's a very um proper way to go about doing it if it's convection microwave you're gonna use the same process and you're gonna wanna make sure that the the chamber and the fan assembly is extremely clean okay so that is microwaves now we're moving on to one of the most important areas in the kitchen and that is the sink so a stainless steel sink or a corian sink you could casher and you're going to casher it similar to a lot of things that we mentioned you're going to clean it out very thoroughly you're not going to use it for 24 hours then you're going to boil a kettle of water or a pot of water and you're going to do the process of eroi that means directly pouring the hot water onto the entire surface area of the sink but understand it has to be direct hit it cannot be run off that means the kettle where the water air the the water flow has to hit straight every area you can't just have it hit one area or the side and let it spill over it has to literally the the the water has to hit each area so that's not so easy many people have like a team come into their house now here's the thing a lot of the teams especially this year they're going to use steam and you should be aware that conjuring with steam is very controversial many people um quote the crc as to saying that it's okay i just spoke to them today it is not okay ramosha did not allow it the crc does not allow it i do believe the star k does allow it but it's a very controversial method i personally uh don't endorse it so i i if you're going to hire someone and they're going to come in with their steam machine it's not really acceptable for sure not according to the crc contra moisture and not according to uh my humble opinion so uh for a sink you're going to want to have them do iroi they may not want to do error iriza is not so simple it's not it's not it's not the safest thing because again you're gonna have really hot boiling water and it's gonna want to hit each area so some people put inserts into their sink that would be okay because you cannot put dishes into a sink that has not been uh considered again the most acceptable way is error you boil water and you pour it directly onto the sink um here's the deal with the the sink head sink head also needs eroi so you're going to pour water from a pot or a kettle directly onto the faucet however there are two parts of the sink that have a certain complication and that is the strainer the strainer has small parts to it in other words there are cracks and they're crevices and they're holes and it's very hard to clean a strainer cut to contour a strainer and therefore you're going to want to have a new strainer for pesach the same thing goes for the aerator of the faucet the aerator is nearly impossible to contour because there's so many small parts you're going to want to have a new aerator for pesach or just take it out and just have a sort of the open sinkhead and it might not be the most elegant looking sink but it will be kosher so their two aces are either again remove the aerator or go online find out what kind of sink you have and order a new piece that's what we did we found that the the type of aerator we use and the new one comes the next day or two days later so um it's cheaper just to take it out if you want to replace it that's also going to also replace the um the strainer so that's basically how the sink goes again clean it out wait 24 hours do iroi um pour hot water on every on every uh part of the sink and the strainer and aerator preferable um to replace okay now let's talk about countertops your favorite subject the most um the subject get that gets the most shyless and it's a very easy area of the kitchen to deal with in terms of no just knowing how to casher let's find it okay so the countertops basically uh except for plastic which we said we're not capturing in different through a moisture or formica which also we're not going to caution uh ceramic we don't catch her cement glass we don't capture but almost all other materials could be captured now let me tell you off the bat even though you could caution most countertops the easiest thing is to cover it you know why uh make yourself crazy with a lot of hot water putting yourself in a dangerous situation now the ideal ideal thing to do is casher and cover but this year uh it's not so easy to do the ideal so let's either let's do one or the other this year we're going to either cover which is probably the easiest way to go there are services somebody mentioned to me you can have a um a hard plastic cover well right a loose side cover you could have a team come down they'll measure your kitchen and they'll loose side cover your whole kitchen that's an expensive way you could have uh i think it's called corrugated cardboard it's like a hard plastic thick car um a hard plastic a thick plastic i think that's what we do and you keep it from year to year and it covers and this way you don't have to bother with uh cash ring which is which is difficult and then slightly dangerous if you want a kosher um it's not that complicated you're going to do era you're going to clean the counters you're going to wait 24 hours and you're gonna pour hot water over every um inch of the counter again that's uh that's how to do it now let's just talk about materials for now natural stone you could caution without a problem what's natural stone granite marble limestone quartzite soapstone slade onyx these are all man-made materials and they could be consumed without a problem regardless of the sealant now man-made materials that are made to look like granite or marble could be consumed as long as there are no scratches or stains so these man-made materials include quartz resin and common brands are cambria caesar stone silly stone q stone and zodiac i hope i'm pronouncing it correctly these could be kosher for pesach acrylic polyester they look like stone the common brands are avenide corian gibraltar high max mega knight starring sorel and swanstone and these could be casual provided they're not scratched or stained if they're scratched and stained just cover them but again glass ceramic cement and porcelain we do not cannot be cautious stainless steel uh if you have a stainless steel or a copper zinc countertop they're metal and they of course can be consumed if your counters are made out of wood or butcher block i don't know why that would be unless you've taken up the occupation of being a butcher uh with wood we don't usually catch unless you sand it down and then they could be captured okay so though we discussed today microwaves sinks and counter tops and hopefully there's this hashem tomorrow we will move on to um the oven okay so we're making a good progress hat everybody in your preps and uh we're just going to end up by saying one cup of tortilla to hillam shrimp should send a rafa to all the israel and to anyone in our show who needs a refugee lamer we're going to say kapito sadi alef yoshev you've just experienced another torah class brought to 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