This Genius Bread Clip Cleaning Hack Will Leave Your Kitchen Sparkling

Keeping the kitchen clean is non-negotiable in most households. The space where you prepare and eat your bodega-style chopped cheese sandwich or bake that classic buttermilk vanilla cake for a friend's birthday needs to be sparkling for your health and your peace of mind; however, sometimes the little things get overlooked. All of those tiny crevices where greasy grime and food can get stuck can allude the eye until it doesn't. That's where those bread clips – the tags that keep your bread bags closed — come in handy: You can use them as a super, miniature scraper.

The nooks and crannies of the stove, the microwave, and even the pulls of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen are havens for collecting the tiniest of food crumbs and grease, but they can be difficult to reach to remove all that dirt. A bread tag, which generally gets tossed into the garbage once you've polished off a loaf of bread or a bag of hot dog buns, is thin enough, yet sturdy enough to maneuver in those close quarters and gently scrape across surfaces to remove the build-up.

If you are a fan of natural cleaning tips for your home, what you will love about using bread clips is giving something that is generally non-recyclable a second life. Simply insert the tag into that thin space where your handle meets the cabinet and you will be amazed how much dirt comes out with the tag when you slide it across. The same is true when you pull it across cabinet moldings, around the knobs of your stove, and all of those little openings that don't get the daily cleaning. 

Why do knobs, handles, and cabinet crevices get dirty in the first place? When you are measuring everything from bread crumbs to flour and sugar, it's easy to have an errant dusting or sprinkling land in these locations. Additionally, when cooking with oils and butter, grease is bound to splatter and build up on surfaces you never realized it could reach. It might not happen immediately, but it does happen, and once it does, you cannot unsee it.

Beyond cleaning the tight corners, you can also use bread clips no longer keeping your bread fresh to scrape small food bits from bread and cookie dough making from a countertop. Or if you have any sticker gunk left on a new glass and want to save your fingernails, bread clips can also help scrape and remove the leftover residue. 

Your bread clips can only clean so much. Dripping sauces and juices as well as spilling foods and not realizing you've done so until after it has congealed to whatever it fell upon, is standard practice for most cooks. If you find this happens to your drawers and cabinets, you may have to remove your knobs and handles and soak them in hot, soapy water to rid them of the greasy grime that builds up over time if it is particularly thick or sticky. 

This is something to consider when you are doing a deep cleaning. If you are a little militant about using your bread tag to scrape away dirt and sticky stuff on the surface, it will help decrease the frequency with which you need to clean them. That said, be gentle when you scrape your surfaces with your bread tag so you don't scratch them or do any damage to them when you are making your kitchen sparkling clean.