A couple of years ago, a tenant called me on the phone and told me that her dishwasher smelled bad and that the bad odor was getting worse. I went over to her apartment, sniffed inside her dishwasher, and said: “Your dishwasher smells like fish. Do you know why?” She told me that she didn’t know why but that maybe – just maybe – it was because she had been cooking salmon in her dishwasher. That left me confused. She then showed me a cookbook with a recipe in it for salmon cooked in a dishwasher. This was something that I had not heard about before. I told her to stop cooking fish in her dishwasher and to run the dishwasher twice with nothing in it except dishwasher detergent. When I got home, I went online and searched ‘fish cooked in a dishwasher.’ To my surprise, I found dozens of recipes for fish cooked in a dishwasher. (No. I’m not making this up, although this story may sound just too bizarre to be true. Go to Google and check it out for yourself.)

Cooking fish in a dishwasher is a really bad idea, no matter what anybody tells you. Predictably, your dishwasher will smell like fish. Even worse, cooking fish in your dishwasher could make you very sick. The heat in your dishwasher may not be sufficient to kill parasites and dangerous microorganisms like salmonella. The temperature inside a dishwasher doesn’t get anywhere nearly as high as the temperature inside an oven. That’s why there are plastic parts inside your dishwasher, but there are no plastic parts inside your oven. I also found recipes online for chicken, turkey, eggs, lobster, and lasagna cooked in a dishwasher. You should never cook food in your dishwasher. It isn’t designed for that. (Yes, everyone knows that you have to be very smart to get into U.C. Berkeley, but unfortunately, the SAT doesn’t have any questions on it like: “Should you cook fish in your oven or your dishwasher?”)

I can’t figure out why anybody would want to cook fish in a dishwasher. If an apartment has a dishwasher, it also has a stove. There are lots of apartments that have a stove but no dishwasher, but I’ve never seen an apartment that had a dishwasher but no stove. Take a look at the photo below. I copied this photo from a recipe for salmon cooked in a dishwasher on the Realtor.com web site. It seems to me that they should know better than to recommend something like this. Look at this photo and ask yourself – What sort of person would look at this picture and not immediately know that there is something wrong – very wrong – with this?