23 Mar 3 Great Tips For Cleaning Your Fridge
Fridges are well-used appliances. Everyone in the household dips in and out of them all of the time. Milk gets spilt when the children are having a bowl of cereal, dribbles down the side of the bottle, which then gets placed back inside the door to fester and congeal. When he comes home from work late, he makes no qualms about grabbing a spoon from the draw and shovelling huge mouthfuls of the leftover curry or casserole straight from the pot, splashing sauce all over the shelves as he goes. Those vegetables that you bought to make some nice Mediterranean pitta breads? Oh, that’s right – we ended up having a takeaway that night, and now those once-lovely veggies have wilted, rotted and leaked their green juices to pool in the corner of the salad draw.
Yes, fridges get messy. And when they get really messy, they can even start to smell.
And that’s a real shame. The fridge should be the beacon of freshness in the kitchen. It’s where indeed you store all of your fresh ingredients. Your meats, your fish, your salad, your herbs, your vegetables. Every time you open your fridge you should be inspired by the sights and the aromas to get cooking – and not by any means flinch in disgust at what wafts your way when you open the vacuum.
And so, it really is the very pinnacle of good housekeeping that you keep your fridge nice and clean.
Time, of course, can prove to be an inhibiting factor when it comes to cleaning (or at least it often gets used as an excuse). But, if you follow the tips below, then not only will you be able to whizz through the chore in a flash, you will leave your fridge looking sparkling clean and smelling fresher than it’s been since you bought it.
- Wipe Up Any Spills As You Go Along
There’s no point crying over spilt milk – so long as you clean it up immediately. And that goes for anything else that ends up getting spilt in the fridge. If you leave things to dry hard, then they can become an absolute nightmare to get off – and no one likes to use the dinner knives as chisels.
So, any time that you spill something, grab a dishcloth or wet wipe and wipe it up immediately. Another good tip is to make sure that everything you put in there is as drip-free as possible. So, wipe those milk bottles before you return them to the fridge. And do the same with jam jars and ketchup bottles and salad dressing bottles too.
- Once A Week, Clean The Doors And The Handles
Too many people leave this job go for too long. The grooves in the seals of fridge doors seem to be the perfect place for crusty black dirt to accumulate. Goodness knows what it is or where it comes from, but it doesn’t take long for a long crusty scab to form. The fridge door handles, too, are very prone to becoming sticky with fingerprints, and of course are a prime place for bacteria to harbour.
Hot soapy water is the elixir for both of these maladies. Just wet a dishcloth and get right into all of those corners and grooves and edges of the doors, then give the handle a good soaping too (in fact, you may need to do this more than once a week if there are a lot of sticky fingers in your family).
- Once A Month, Clean The Interior
You can’t get away without doing this job forever (unfortunately). It is a bit of a palaver, granted – taking everything out of the fridge and stacking it up on the kitchen table is just annoying, nobody knows why, but it is – but it won’t take you more than 15 minutes at most.
If you’ve been a little lacklustre with wiping up the spills as you go along, then you will inevitably have a few smears here and there, for which the words “caked-on residue” most definitely apply. To remove these, a good tip is to mix 2 tablespoons of baking powder with a litre of hot water and “rehydrate” the spillages for a couple of minutes. While this is happening you can use the solution to clean the rest of the fridge. As mentioned above, smell is just as important as actual cleanliness, which is why you shouldn’t use soap, as this will leave a very distinctive scent in its wake, which your food will actually absorb. Wipe your interior with a dry tea towel when you’ve finished.
Got any more tips for cleaning the fridge? Does the baking powder solution work well for you, or is there another concoction that you swear by? Let your fellow readers know in the comments below.
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