Do you ever find your pots and pans are getting stained with a buildup of burnt food? Sometimes, it seems impossible to get those stains out without heavy-duty cleaning products.
Lucky for us, Instagrammer Kamana has a super-easy cleaning hack that will restore your pots and pans to new condition.
The scoop:
Digital creator Kamana Bhaskaran (@kamanabhaskaran) posted a video on Instagram, sharing her grandma's onion hack to clean burnt pans.
Kamana's instructions are to cut up an onion, leaving the peel on, and put it into your burnt pot or pan with a quarter cup of distilled white vinegar. Then, bring the onion and vinegar to a boil for about 10 minutes, and the stains and burnt pieces will eventually be lifted from the bottom.
Kamana explains that the natural acidity from the onion and vinegar works to break down the burnt food and stains. She recommends using a scouring sponge afterward to remove any remaining stains.
How it's helping:
This brilliant hack not only brings pots and pans back to life without replacing them, but it also relies on natural and cheap household products rather than chemical cleaning products.
This is one of many examples of swapping out potentially harmful cleaning products for sustainable and safer alternatives. Whether it is using vinegar to clean your stainless steel appliances or mixing a quick concoction of hydrogen peroxide, dish soap, and baking soda to remove even the toughest of stains on fabrics, alternatives are easy and everywhere.
Using sustainable alternatives to cleaning products has numerous benefits for the environment and human health and safety. One of the most impactful reasons to switch to sustainable cleaning solutions is to reduce plastic waste. In a report from NRDC about how to reduce plastic waste, it's stated that 80% of the plastic that ends up in the oceans comes from land, having been swept into waterways from sewers due to heavy rains.
By reducing our waste output, the risk of our waste getting into waterways decreases altogether. This is especially important with plastic, as plastic lasts incredibly long in our ecosystems before breaking down, as per NRDC.
What everyone's saying:
Instagram users are psyched about the hack.
"Much needed hack!!! Thanks for sharing!" commented one user.
"I wish I knew before!" said another.
"Do you think it would work with an onion cut in half? Cause I would need a hack for eyes watering too," joked a third user.
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