How long do you wait for dairy?

I'm not at the stage where I wait yet (though I'm doing way better at separating than I used to- thank you, Chinese cooking, for your disinclination to use dairy products), but when I start really following it, it'll be half an hour. My impression was that for meat following dairy, that's pretty standard (or you can just rinse out your mouth and eat it right after).

For dairy after eating meat, it'll either be for three hours or an hour. I'm basing that on the fact that ethnically, I'm German and Dutch; the Germans, from what I understand, wait three, while the Dutch only wait one. USCJ says on their page about kashrut that prevailing custom within the denomination is to wait three hours.

(Note: I would have filed this topic under "Ritual and mitzvot" since it is about kashrut.)

The length of time to wait between meat and dairy seldom matters for me because I eat meat only about once a week and almost always at dinner which is late in the day.

I have to admit that I didn't ask my sponsoring rabbi how long to wait because since he is very traditional and he grew up in an Orthodox Ashkenazi home, so he would be likely to say to wait six hours, which is also what Rabbi Klein says in the "A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice" (the authoritative guide to Halacha for Conservative Jews which is also very traditional for many areas of halacha). However, my rabbi might also have told me that there is an accepted range, and he probably would say that the waiting time is OK as long as it is supported by any Conservative rabbinical responsum.

In the rare situation in which I do eat meat at lunch, and really want to eat dairy later that day (rather than just have a pareve next meal which avoids the issue) I wait until "the next meal" (for which there is support in the Talmud) and a minimum of four hours. I suppose it should be three or six hours, I don't really remember how I started to use four hours. Maybe it is because I eat chicken much more often than beef (or even more rarely lamb) and since not mixing chicken with dairy is only rabbinically prohibited, some have the custom of waiting only four hours after chicken.

About pareve food: I asked my rabbi about something I read in Klein about putting a pareve food (such as fish) cooked in a (clean) meat pot on a dairy plate. He kind of flinched and said that you shouldn't do it, but when I started to show him the passage in Klein, he said that if it says its OK in Klein then it's OK, and didn't want to look at the passage itself. It is true however, that the passage in Klein was in the section called "accidents" even though the scenario was not described as an accident. Other support for this practice comes from watching the mother of the family of our Orthodox Yemenite friends in Israel (whose father was at one time the chief Sephardic rabbi of a small town in Israel) take pareve cold leftovers from a meat meal, transfer them to a dairy bowl, and serve them with a dairy meal. I have a lot of pareve pyrex for cooking vegetable side dishes, so then I can serve vegetable leftovers from a meat meal at dairy meal. (The OU would not probably not allow this since they say that you can't even serve leftover pareve bread from a meat meal at a dairy meal.)

More about pareve foods taking on the status of the pots they are cooked in:

My rabbi mentioned that when his late wife was very ill (she died of cancer), many people brought them meals and would often tell them label the food as "pareve" but not note whether it was cooked in dairy or meat cookware. Evidently, he does not put pareve food cooked in one type of cookware on the other type of plate because he said that he bought a set of glass dishes to use for that purpose since glass does not technically take on the status of the food placed on it. He also noted that he did this only due to the uncertainty of the dairy/meat status of the food, not because he doubted the kashrut (as long as someone said that it was cooked in a kosher home). My rabbi certainly eats food cooked in homes that keep less stringent kashrut standards than he does in his own home.

Other issues of glass in kashrut:
My rabbi poskens that Pyrex cookware used in the oven, and reaching temps above boiling, does become permanently dairy or meat according to the food cooked in it. And the cookware can no longer be "kashered" back to Pareve status. But he says that Pyrex used only in the microwave where temps do not exceed boiling, can be kashered in boiling water. There are also more lenient Conservative opinions and more stringent Orthodox opinions on Pyrex.)

Did you know that you can see a lot of it on Google books? If you haven't actually seen it yet, you might want to check it out before buying. Here is a link:
Klein's Guide to Jewish Religious Practice

The one thing that drives me nuts about the book is its use of the academic Hebrew transliteration: "miqweh" for "mikveh", for example. It is also not complete or current with respect to the Conservative rulings of the past 30-40 years which differ from the Orthodox on kashrut, women, homosexuals, etc. And I think that he should have consulted more with his wife or other homemakers on kashrut in the home. I rather doubt that she was pouring boiling water into their wooden cupboards to kasher them for Pesach. I'm pretty sure the water would seep into cracks and do serious damage to most wood cabinets.

But it's still a good resource book.

I only eat red meat late in the day. However I would wait 6 hours after eating meat before eating dairy. I wait 30 minutes when going from dairy to meat (including cheeses).

But poultry and foul are different. I only wait an hour for those (I also eat chicken more often).

When it comes to cookware I now only have one set. I use Corelle dishes (technically glass) that I have two different sets of. But for some, this would be irrelevant since I only have one set of cookware.

BRNechama wrote:

When it comes to cookware I now only have one set. I use Corelle dishes (technically glass) that I have two different sets of. But for some, this would be irrelevant since I only have one set of cookware.

Do you actually cook both dairy and meat in the same cookware? (at different times, not mixed together?) Even before I made our kitchen strictly kosher, when most of our cookware had been used for both, I bought a minimal set for kosher Dairy only (a set of beautiful blue oven-safe pans, Pyrex-like from Anchor Hocking, not Corning) because none of our Orthodox friends would have been able to eat cooked food at our house if we used our treif cookware. But separate cookware is "d'Rabbanan", not "d'Oraita" (Torah-based) which is why I know that my rabbi would have been willing to allow me to convert even if we didn't have separate cookware as long as the ingredients and methods we used (no meat/dairy mixing) were strictly kosher.

My dairy dishes are glass with a blue pattern. My meat dishes are Corelle. I chose glass dishes (Corelle counts as glass too) not only because I had fallen in love with my dairy dishes years before I bought them, but also since I was worried that we'd mess up and use the wrong dishes since we didn't have ingrained kosher habits. Glass dishes can't get permanently "treifed" and can just be washed if anyone accidentally put the wrong food on them.

Recently, I've been listening to a series of six lectures on Kashrut by Mechon Hadar:
Keeping Kosher in a Non-kosher World
Four of the six lectures have been given so far. The source sheets and audio recordings are posted for the sessions several days after the lecture is given. Warning: these lectures assume a rather advanced knowledge of kashrut and Jewish learning. All the Hebrew and Aramaic sources are translated, but Jewish law terminology and various Hebrew terms and phrases are used freely.

Debbie B. wrote:

Do you actually cook both dairy and meat in the same cookware? (at different times, not mixed together?)

Yes, this would be me!

Hmm....did you simply not invite anyone from your Orthodox shul over for cooked meals, or only use disposable pans for that, or did you not tell them about your cookware?

Before we had a strictly kosher kitchen, when I wanted to host our kosher-observant friends for the first time, I would go through an elaborate description of what we did or didn't do in our kitchen and then ask our friends whether this or that would be permissible to them. All of our Orthodox and some of our Conservative friends would not be willing to eat food cooked using cookware that had been used for both meat and dairy. We also never served meat even though we did have a kosher-meat-only crockpot and could have used disposable plates and utensils. But we felt it would be pushing the trust of our kosher-observant friends with meat. As it is, even with a strictly kosher kitchen there are things we are more careful about with our Orthodox friends. For example, we do eat kosher, but non-Glatt meat (i.e. Triangle K hechsher), but we can't serve that to our Orthodox friends who don't eat non-Glatt meat. However, they don't think non-Glatt meat is definitely "treif" either, and thus its use by us for other meals does not "treif" our cookware.

Debbie B. wrote:

Hmm....did you simply not invite anyone from your Orthodox shul over for cooked meals, or only use disposable pans for that, or did you not tell them about your cookware?

Haha...this is a non-issue for me, since I don't really cook; much less invite others over for meals!

My non-Jewish boyfriend is the cook. In fact, he was the first person to use several of the cookware items in my kitchen.

I don't invite others over either and my only Orthodox friend would probably be just fine eating at my house (she'll eat vegetarian in restaurants). I am still working on having all separate dishes. I'm doing pretty well so far. There are just some things I really don't feel like replacing right now like a new food processor bowl. It wouldn't make sense to do that yet.