QUESTION

Chicago, IL

Any recommendations for an Ashkenazi Jew whose roommate is a Kitniyot eating Sephardi vegan viz. pots and pans and dishes etc.?

ANSWER

Yes, it’s totally fine. Kitniyot are bateil berov – Shulchan Arukh OC 453:1 and Mishnah Berurah 453:9. As such, we can assume that there is rov of the actual food being cooked against what it absorbed. Admittedly, this can be questioned:

1. Maybe with all the ways we go to extremes to assume that the pot absorbed its entire volume (or the amount of food being cooked, whichever is less), we should assume that there might not be rov against the food absorbed (as absurd as this might be).
2. Rema is only talking about bedieved, he doesn’t allow mixing them lekhatchilah.

That being said,

1. Regarding percentages (<50%),
   1. Given that we are so lenient to allow rov, we should be able to assume a more normal assessment of how much of the kitniyot is absorbed.
   2. The logic is that they only forbade קטניות בעין not תערובת קטניות (see Mishnah Berurah 453:9). Thus, no matter how much we theoretically assess the absorbed kitniyot to be, there is no question that they are not בעין, and we are dealing with only a ta’arovet.
   3. He can always ask his Sephardi roommate to taste it and see if he can taste the kitniyot (not really necessary, but it would work! Great case of te’imat Yisrael).
2. Regarding lekhatchilah/bedieved,
   1. The pots are washed with soap and hot water so it can be argued that it is pagum and not a problem at all.
   2. Given the extreme kula of 50%, there is good reason to argue that they never forbade the pot to begin with.
   3. Once it is in the walls of the pot, it is already not be’ein in the walls of the pot, so it is already mutar. Rema only implicitly did not allow lekhatchilah when talking about be’ein.
   4. You are not intentionally mixing, you are just intentionally using the pot.

For Acharonim on this (but not necessarily the particular arguments I laid out), see Yechaveh Da’at 5:32. He is talking in that teshuva about eating non-kitniyot food that your Sephardi friend cooked for you in his kitniyot keilim, not you doing it yourself lekhatchilah, which he does not address.

Kaf HaChayim 453:27, does say one is not allowed to do it ben yomo lekhatchilah, but can do it eino ben yomo lekhatchilah.

Bottom line – It is ideal to wait until its been 24 hours since the last use of the pots and pans.

That being said, when necessary, I would not have a problem doing it earlier. First, if it is after linat layla, we can definitely rely on that here that that makes it pagum.

Even if it is definitely ben yomo, it would seem to me that one can allow it when necessary (with acknowledging that this is not the general approach of the Achronim). It seems to me that given that it is already not be’ein in the walls of the pot, and given that one has cleaned it with soap and hot water, as well as the other reasons mentioned above, that is more than enough to rely on in the case of kitniyot when necessary.