Why There Should Always Be A Cup Of Vinegar On Your Kitchen Counter

Vinegar is a jack of all trades that can take your meal to the next level and clean your counters at the same time. There's a type of vinegar that works perfectly for almost any job: red wine vinegar is a rockstar ingredient in salad dressings and marinades, apple cider vinegar has a reputation for having health benefits, distilled vinegar is great for making pickles, and white vinegar is great for cleaning. Just a little bit of vinegar is the secret to creating a well-balanced hot sauce at home, and vinegar adds pizzaz to beef stew. The acidity in vinegar can improve store-bought BBQ sauce and is perfect for pickling almost anything. But there's another way you should be using vinegar in your kitchen, one that will keep it smelling fresh.

A cup of white vinegar on your kitchen counter helps combat heavy cooking odors that can permeate your kitchen after you've made a meal. Put it next to your stove when you start cooking things like curry, fish, liver sausage, or anything else that leaves lingering odors. About one cup of vinegar does the trick, but you don't have to use exact measurements for this cleaning hack to work.

White vinegar is good at neutralizing bad odors because it contains acetic acid, which is released into the kitchen as the vinegar slowly evaporates from the open bowl on the counter. As acetic acid encounters the molecules that are causing bad odor in the air, it breaks the bonds that hold the molecules together. As these molecules disappear, so do the bad smells that they create. A bowl of white vinegar is an effective and easy solution to lingering kitchen odors, and it's not that expensive. You can find a one-gallon jug of distilled white vinegar for around $13 on Amazon.

You can kick it up a notch for really bad smells by creating a DIY vinegar simmer pot, half filled with water and half with distilled white vinegar. The steam released into the air will carry the acetic acid further through the space and help remove more stubborn odors from the air. And while you only need to boil vinegar water to get rid of extra-noxious odors in your kitchen, a cup of room temperature white vinegar is a great way to trap odors all day, every day. Just be sure to refresh the vinegar in the cup every few days for the best results.