Six surprising cleaning tips—with a potato!
You can boil them, bake them, roast them and mash them*: potatoes are incredibly versatile, but did you know you can also use them to scrub, mop and polish? Read through these cleaning tips with potatoes and make a nice cleaning solution—your whole house will become a spotless spud palace!
Cleaning a rusty pan
A beautiful cast-iron skillet needs proper care, because if it gets too much soap and too little love, it will start to rust. Is there one with rust spots in the cupboard? Don’t throw it away—polish it up with a potato. Potatoes contain a type of acid that makes it easy to remove rust. Cut a large potato in half, dip the cut side in baking soda and use it to polish the rusty pan. If the potato gets a little limp, cut off a slice and carry on polishing. Rust gone? Rinse and dry the pan, and you’re done! And never neglect it that badly again, okay?
Stained cutlery
While you’re removing the rust, deal with discolored or stained cutlery too. Old chef’s knives, serving spoons with water spots, rust spots on a cake server: scrub them with your potato and it will all come off.
Dirty silverware
Of course, you can polish it with silver polish. Your whole house will stink and you’ll have sore muscles the next day. No—try this trick instead: save the cooking water from the potatoes and place the stained silverware in it. Leave it for an hour, then wipe it clean: goodbye grime, hello silver shine!
Glasses that no longer fog up
Do you also get misty lenses when you step from the cold into a warm room? Or foggy glasses because of your face mask? Rub your lenses with a cut potato and they won’t fog up anymore. The starch helps you maintain clear vision.
Cleaning up broken glass
Crash—a glass breaks. Into a thousand pieces, if you’re unlucky. You can easily pick up the large pieces (carefully!), but the tiny shards are harder to find. Luckily, you have your potatoes ready: cut one in half and press it onto all the spots where you suspect there may be glass shards. The pieces will stick into the potato.
Bye-bye, little stains
A whole puddle of red wine on a white shag carpet: no, that’s never going to end well. But you can remove small splashes with a raw potato. Dab a piece of potato onto the stain and watch it disappear.
*Recognize it? The Aardappel Anders jingle from the 1990s?
Read also:
- Peel potatoes super quickly with this trick
- Recipe: warm potato salad by Julius Jaspers
- Sweet potato versus regular potato: which is healthier?
Source: The Kitchen
