When you’re a professional chef, you look at a kitchen much differently than the average person who’s only cooking for three people a night. It’s similar to how a mechanic listens to their car’s engine or a professional soccer player watches their kid play AYSO.
An experienced chef, who goes by @Friends_and_Neighbors on TikTok, recently shared some tips with her followers while making a trip to the industrial kitchen supply store, and one was a controversial choice: picking up bus bins for her home kitchen.
“We use it to contain dirty dishes & keep the sink clean,” she wrote in the comments below the video. “Some use them for schlepping clean dishes back to their respective place in the kitchen. So many opportunities for success, with bus tub.”
But many commenters were repulsed by the idea of a bus bin in their kitchen.
“No one in the history of forever has said, ‘I need a bus tub at home,’ been watching too much of the bear or something,” L. AG wrote. “Skip the bus tub, but all the rest are a must,” Buick added. However, Becca disagreed: “Everybody seems anti-bus tub, but isn’t the point just to have a place to put your dirty dishes that isn’t the sink, so it’s easier to use your sink while you’re cooking?”
The video’s reaction inspired the chef to come back with a follow-up video that explains how she uses a bus bin in her kitchen. Mainly, it’s to augment sink space so that it won’t fill with dishes, making it easier to wash your hands or defrost meat. “I had no idea that this was gonna be controversial, but apparently using a bus bin in your home is controversial,” she said in the video.
How to use a bus bin in your kitchen
1: Dirty dish staging
Your sink and your counters are now clear. You can thaw meat, clean vegetables, wash hands, or fill water bottles.
2: It augments the capacity of your sink
If you have a single sink, now you have a double sink; you can pre-soak dishes in the bus bin, or you can wash in your regular sink and sanitize in your bus bin.
3: Clean dish staging
Maybe you want to unload your dishwasher into a bus bin and then walk around your kitchen, putting everything where it belongs in one trip instead of two or three.
To use a bus bin or not?
Courtney Iseman, a writer at Tasting Table, agrees with the chef: bus bins are a must in the average American kitchen.
“Bus bins can be used to organize ingredients, hold linens, and store any number of various odds and ends, like takeout containers and smaller storage container lids,” she writes. “This is where the lightbulb goes off for us at home: If bus bins can be used for all this organization and storage, can’t we use that convenience in our own kitchens?”
For some, the bus bin is a great idea to make their sink more functional. For others, they’re an eyesore that’ll only make the kitchen more messy. The bus bin, a big chunk of sturdy plastic, may not be glamorous, but it challenges us to rethink our kitchens and see greater potential in our sink than we may have thought initially.
