Foods You Never Knew You Could Clean the Kitchen With

Forget about all the expensive cleaners that you are constantly buying from the stores. Or at least forget about the ones you buy for daily usage. Did you know that your kitchen includes actual foods that work just as good as any labelled house cleaning agent? Just as you do not need a costly window cleaner to tackle your window cleaning with when you can use an all-purpose solution and a newspaper, you also do not need special polishes for wooden floors, high-priced disinfectants or pricey dish washing liquids to deal with rust or sticky food leftovers. Your kitchen cabinet and your refrigerator can surprise you with cheaper and just as efficient solutions. And here are 10 of them:

1. Baking soda
Let’s start with the obvious. Everybody knows baking soda can clean and does extremely well for a variety of stains and will even kill odours. This is the universal cleaner you can use in your home on a daily basis and for everything.

2. Vinegar
The other all-purpose cleaner for when you are house cleaning with home-found products. Just as baking soda, vinegar does wonders for most stains, and its acidic properties give the added effect of disinfecting the cleaned spot.

3. Salt
Table salt is wonderful for absorbing grease from stains, as well as cleaning up the board after slicing up or mincing meat. Another great use for it is to clean sticking food stains from dishes – simply sprinkle salt over the stain, add water, let it soften up, and then wipe away.

4. Lemons
Lemons are brilliant disinfectants. They contain citric acid which eats through problematic stains and will help with cleaning stains as well as cleansing the spot.

5. Ketchup
You might feel sceptical about that, yes, but it does work on rust. If you have rusty copper pans or skillets, rub ketchup all over them and watch as the rust backs off, leaving a gleaming surface behind.

6. Rice
Rice is not so much a cleaner as it is the tool. It is perfect for dealing with the inside of vases. You can add uncooked rice grains inside a vase that desperately needs attention, add a little hot water and detergent, and immediately shake the vase up, or use a long brush to stir the grains and rub them against the surface. Easy job.

7. Walnuts
Yes, walnuts can clean, especially if you are cleaning a wooden surface. They are abrasive enough to remove stains and soft enough not to leave scratch marks. And the best part – they will fill up the cracks and crevasses in the wooden surface as well.

8. Powdered orange or lemon drink
You know those concentrated powders that give you tasty drinks? Considering what a pain they are to remove if the powder is sprayed on a surface, it is surprising that they work very well against stains themselves. The amount of citric acid they contain can clear out a lot of rust from your dishes.

9. Cream of tartar
Yes, this is a plausible home cleaning solution for utensils. Sometimes the dish washer leaves behind grey marks which look awful on your aluminium or stainless steel utensils, but that can be immediately rectified with a swab of cream of tartar.

10. Vodka
Let’s face it, vodka contains mostly rubbing alcohol which is a wonderful disinfectant and it can handle quite a few problematic stains by simply disintegrating the dirt.

All this and many more miracle cleaners await you in your kitchen cabinets, so don’t go crazy and spend all your hard-earned cash on those pricey cleaners when all the solutions you need you already own. You can actually keep the home clean with ingredients straight from the fridge, so what would be the point of spending all your money?