Replace These Kitchen Items Weekly, According To Martha Stewart

As much as the kitchen is a space for creativity and function, it is also a high-risk area for harmful bacteria. One big culprit of this is the humble dish towel, which makes sense given that its whole job is to get wet and clean other surfaces. According to Martha Stewart, these items should be on a steady weekly rotation, getting replaced and washed after no more than a week of use, per Food & Wine. This is because the absorbent nature of dish towels locks in moisture but also provides a breeding ground for germs, which can easily transfer between surfaces.

Dish towels come in varied, affordable sets, making this chore a little less daunting. Most households could probably get away with using two towels per week, so one full set should keep you in good stead. It's an industry standard in restaurants to use multiple dishcloths in favor of oven mitts given the ease of movement they afford the user; this advice may resonate with some home chefs who are constantly on the move. That said, when all your dish towels look the same, you may forget how long a towel has been in use, especially if you don't have a set laundry day. In this case, you may benefit more from a multicolored pack of towels, so you can assign one color to each week of the month.

As far as possible, it's best to wash dish towels on their own or with other towels and cleaning materials. The main reason for this is that the best cleaning will result from high temperatures and no fabric softener, an approach that isn't so conducive to the laundering of regular clothing. Set your washing machine to a hot 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit), and you can even pre-treat with stain remover before throwing in the towel, as it were. Another tip is to soak the towels in vinegar before washing them (by hand or in the machine) or adding a half cup of that vinegar into the machine before you start the load. This takes the place of fabric softener and will give a softness to the towels again, whereas traditional softeners contain silicone, which can leave your towels with a greasy feel after washing.

As far as storing goes, leave this one up to Martha, too. Her advice is to fold the towels to be stored into small, neat rectangles, which allows you to stack them easily and fit them snugly into most drawers. Knowing that you have a tidy supply nearby will also make it easier not to stretch out the use of a towel that clearly needs a wash. You can organize them by color or by purpose, because you probably don't want your nicer tea towels wiping stains off of the ground. Just remember to abide by your color scheme and avoid pulling one out just because it's at the top of a miscellaneous, albeit neatly folded, pile.