The dish pit guy at my old job told me to stop soaking sheet pans, and he was dead wrong
Back when I worked at a busy diner in Tulsa, the lead dish guy always tossed our greasy sheet pans straight into a soapy sink and let them sit all shift. When I asked why he did not scrub right away, he said soaking lifts everything off so you barely have to touch them. I tried it his way for three weeks and the baked on grease turned into this sticky film that took twice as long to get off. A health inspector walked through in June and flagged two pans on the rack that still had that greasy haze. I finally just scraped them hot with a bench scraper right off the line and ran them through the machine, and they came out clean in one pass. Anybody else have an old school trick like that fall apart when you actually timed it?
My go to move used to be soaking everything overnight and patting myself on the back like some kind of genius. Then I finally timed it and realized I was just making slime and wasting an extra hour the next day. Cold pans and a scraper right off the line beats a sink nap every single time.