I'm all for epiphanies and experimentation, but there may be a food safety issue here. The chemicals in fabric softener are not meant to be ingested. Some people even have concerns about them being on fabric next to their skin!

I will assume that after your bowls and utensils were sparkling, you rewashed everything in hot soapy water. Maybe even put them through the dishwasher to eliminate any trace of fabric softener?

That was my mother's advice, and I've read the same thing in almost every good bread book.  Soak in cold water, and wash in cold water, then rinse in hot.

I agree on the health issue.  We won't even let fabric softener through the front door.

Jeff

As a person who can't even walk down the laundry detergent and fabric softener aisle in a grocery store because of allergies to the chemicals in them, I can't imagine cooking or baking with a utensil that came in contact with fabric softener.  Nasty stuff!

We keep a square bucket which takes rinse water (with no soap) in one of our twin kitchen sinks. This way we catch the scarce water and can chuck it on a tree in the garden. Here in Melbourne we are very likely to go onto no-garden-watering-at-all restrictions by end of the coming summer. This also means once a couple of things have been rinsed under a running tap, there is some water to pre-rinse really dirty stuff into without turning on the tap at all, or barely. With whisks, bowl scrapers and even my big stainless steel mixing bowl (that I use to mix 3.4 kg of dough in) I just chuck them in this bucket, and let them soak. The bowl has to be rotated to  get all surfaces immersed. 5 mins later you can brush off any dough residue easy as you like, and then give them a proper clean after that. Some might be a bit put off by having water in a bucket with bits of food residue sitting in the sink, but really it's no big deal and gets emptied on the garden a few times a day, so it doesn't go at all smelly. Better than going down the sewer. Even now at the end of a very dry winter, the ground isn't wet, so every bit now will help soil moisture for once the weather becomes like a hair dryer.

We have also put in 32,000L of rain storage tanks to keep our vegie garden going over summer during water restrictions, but that's another story...

I'm sure that the dishwasher would remove any traces of the softener. Just wondering if a little vinegar would work. I'll try it next time and let you know.

Bettie

Cold water soak works the best.

At the metropol bakery, we let the 5 gallon plastic dough proofing buckets just sit until the dough dried. Then, the dough just falls out in flakes.

Marc

Whilst soaking will undoubtedly loosen dough from bowls and utensils, there is the problem of then getting it off the cleaning cloth / brush / scourer afterwards. I've never tried fabric softener, but does it break down the dough so that it is no longer sticky lumps that work their way into cleaning tools?