What Is The Salad Dressing Cleaning Hack?

Oil and grease can cause a sticky residue to form all over your kitchen, from the stovetop to cabinet doors and above the fridge. While you can see some of this oil physically spitting as you cook on the stove, much of it moves through the air as oil vapor.

Skylar Life explains that as you cook with oils, butter, and food that contains fat, it heats up in the pan and evaporates. When it does so, the oil vapor rises in your kitchen with the hot air and lands on all of your surfaces. If you don't regularly clean these areas, the grease will build up and become difficult to remove. Since it's so sticky, it creates an even bigger mess when dust and dirt become trapped in it. Luckily, the simple salad dressing cleaning hack allows you to use items already in your kitchen to clean up this mess.

The salad dressing hack is very effective at cleaning up built-up grease and gunk in your kitchen because of two ingredients. A basic vinaigrette salad dressing starts with oil and vinegar. It uses these two ingredients because one is a fat and the other is an acid. Using this cleaning method involves two steps. First, you must clean with a fat like olive oil, vegetable oil, or mineral oil. The Maids say mineral oil works best, but you can use what you have available.

It may seem wrong to clean grease with more oil but trust the process. Add a couple of drops of the oil of your choice to a paper towel or clean cloth, then wipe down your greasy surfaces. Moving in circular motions, it should start picking up the excess grease. Depending on how dirty the area is, you may need to use multiple paper towels. You can move on to the next step once the majority of the grease is gone.

Vinegar is used in salad dressings because of its acidity, which is why it is such an excellent all-purpose cleanser. It's made of 5% acid, which cuts through dirt and kills bacteria. Although, when it comes to cleaning, make sure to use distilled white vinegar and not apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar. Before using it for the salad dressing hack, you'll need to dilute it in water first.

The Robert Little Group suggests using a 1-to-1 ratio of vinegar and warm, distilled water. Pour the mixture into a spray bottle and apply it to the surfaces you cleaned with the oil, then wipe the area down with a clean paper towel. If the vinegar odor lingers — which it often does — you can rinse the surface with a fresh paper towel or cloth and some clean water. Alternatively, another way to deal with the strong smell of vinegar is by adding a few drops of essential oil to your spray bottle.