No one likes kitchen smells—especially while entertaining friends and family. Cooking odors and other smells that may have lingered from the dishwasher, refrigerator, garbage disposal, sink and the trash/recycle/compost area can be annoying and downright embarrassing if you have company coming over. Let’s get busy with a few things you can do right now to not only neutralize kitchen odors, but create a pleasant and inviting atmosphere with welcoming scents in the kitchen and surrounding areas.
Here are five super-simple things you can do to remove kitchen odors before you start cooking, or incorporate these into your daily kitchen cleaning routine to prevent unpleasant odors from wafting around in your kitchen. These can be fun things to teach your kids to do as well—give them one or two of the items on this list and teach them how to keep a clean-smelling kitchen!
Cut a few slices of lemon to send down the garbage disposal to take care of those nasty kitchen smells. The cleansing power of citric acid will break up the gunk and grease causing the unpleasant odor, and will create a pleasant lemony scent.
Kitchen smells are everywhere! Put your wet sponges in the dishwasher on a daily basis to keep them clean. Use freshly washed dish towels and rags every day or two. With kitchen rags that are usually placed near the sink or on a rack, be sure you rinse them really well each time you use them, and you can even place them in the dishwasher with the sponges!
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Always wipe down your countertops and sink after you cook to ensure there isn’t any lingering food or liquid left that could cause foul odors and stains. We recommend using one of our Soft Scrub® products to keep your countertops and sink clean and odor-free.
You can also make your own DIY all purpose cleaner to clean your kitchen (and bathroom) surfaces by diluting ½ cup of Borax into 12 ounces of warm water and put into a spray bottle.
Before you begin cooking, start the fan to help clear the air. Leave it on while cooking and even afterward. Keeping your kitchen air circulating is an important step to eliminating kitchen odors.
Try this recipe any day and any season! It cleans the air, helps to eliminate kitchen odors on a daily basis, and adds a nice scent to the air for when your family and friends drop by:
- 3–4 cups of water
- 1 red apple cut into small slices
- ½ teaspoon vanilla
- 2 slices of a real lemon
- 2 cinnamon sticks or 1 tea bag of caffeine-free cinnamon tea
- 3 or 4 cloves
- A dash of nutmeg
- A very small amount of ground ginger (optional)
We hope our tips on how to eliminate kitchen odors have inspired you, and don’t forget to check out our other household organizing tips such as storing food in the kitchen, how to organize your home and setting the table for any occasion. Make sure you register with Ask Team Clean to get more advice and rewards sent to you!