Kashering the Kitchen for Pesach

The kitchen is the main part of preparing a home for Pesach, and the reason is not that it holds the most crumbs. It is that the kitchen is where vessels absorbed chametz all year — through cooking, frying and baking, not merely through contact.

A pot used all year for chametz may not be used on Pesach even scrubbed spotless, because what it absorbed in its walls comes back out into the food. And since chametz on Pesach forbids in the smallest amount, a trace released from a pot wall is enough to make the food chametz.

What the job covers

Everything that food touches, not just the pots:

• Every vessel needed for Pesach that can be kashered.
• Work surfaces — the counter, the dining table, the work tables.
• Shelves, drawers and cupboards.
• The sinks and the taps.
• The hob: its surface and its burners.
• The fridge.

Each has its own method — see hagalah, libun and irui, the oven, the sink and the countertop. Some things cannot be kashered at all.

Storing the chametz vessels

Vessels that will not be used on Pesach do not need kashering. What they need is:

1. Cleaned well before Pesach — before the sixth hour of erev Pesach — and scrubbed so no visible chametz remains.
2. Where chametz is stuck on and cannot be removed: pour cleaning agent onto it, and into the holes and cracks, to spoil it from being edible.
3. Put away in a closed place you have no reason to go to over Pesach, so nobody reaches for them.

Better still, shut them in a designated room and put the key away until after Pesach.

Why a label is not enough

This is the detail worth taking away. Lechatchila the chametz vessels should be stored in a storeroom rather than in the kitchen at all. But where they are kept in the kitchen, a sticker on the cupboard reading "chametz" does not do the job.

What is required instead is to tape the cupboard shut — seal it with adhesive paper so it cannot simply be opened.

The reasoning is precise, and it is about how people actually behave. A label is read by someone who is already paying attention. Someone reaching absently for a pot is not reading anything. Tape makes the hand stop, and in that moment they remember. It is a physical interruption standing in for attention that will not be there.

The same logic runs through handling a vessel that became forbidden during the year.

Selling your chametz does not cover the vessels

A common assumption, and it does not hold. Someone who sells all their chametz still has to clean the vessels, for a straightforward reason: no non-Jew is buying the chametz stuck to your pots, and the pots themselves are not what is being sold.

So scrub and clean them regardless. More at selling chametz.

Where a vessel was not cleaned of stuck chametz before Pesach, it is cleaned and scrubbed during Pesach or afterwards.

What cannot be kashered

Separate these out first and store them with the chametz vessels: earthenware, china, clay, ceramic and porcelain; glass liable to crack in hot hagalah; anything that kashering would damage; and anything you cannot clean or cannot reach the chametz inside.

"I will just buy new"

The Gemara anticipates the shortcut. Ravina asked Rav Ashi what to do about knives for Pesach, and was told: for myself, I make everything new.

Before anyone concludes that buying a new set is the answer, the Gemara raises the obvious objection — that is fine for someone who can afford it; what about someone who cannot? And Rav Ashi clarifies that he never meant literally new: he meant the handles set in clay, the blades in fire, and then the handles into boiling water. He had made them like new, by kashering them.

Which is the point: knowing how to kasher what you own is the skill, because sooner or later you will be using those same vessels.

What your own kitchen needs, and which of your vessels can be kashered, is a question for your rav.