Top 5 Dirtiest Places in Your Family Kitchen
Family Kitchens tend to be the hub of the home, well used and although we tend to clean them more often than other rooms in our homes there are a few spots hiding some grimy horrors and in need of some urgent cleaning!
No matter how much you scrub the worktops or deep clean the oven, your kitchen might be harbouring some pretty dirty hotspots and to help we have listed the Top 5 Dirtiest Places in your Family Kitchen that you might have forgot to pay attention to for a long time!
Oven Gloves
Most people don’t ever think about cleaning their Oven Gloves but if you think about how much food spills on it, or you touch when pick things up and then you spread onto pans or work surfaces, and not forgetting you could be cross contaminating if you touch raw and cooked food!
Tips on Cleaning: High Temperature wash in your washing machine is prefect solution and if your able follow it by a scorcher of a dry out in the tumble dryer all that heat will do them wonders.
Toaster
Your toaster is guilty of collecting bits of food, dust and bugs that can not only contaminate your next slice of bread as you cook it, but too can burn, making a bit of an unpleasant smell and actually pose quite a worrying fire hazard.
Tips on Cleaning: First things first, make sure the toaster is unplugged and cold to touch! Now pretty much every toaster will have a crumb tray so first of you want to pull this out and wash with warm soapy water, dry thoroughly before popping back in. Next you want to turn it upside down and shake it like a maraca over the sink. Then to clean the inside of the toaster get an toothbrush and using white vinegar give the inside bars a clean, don’t soak it and you can wipe it after with a damp cloth, not forgetting to wipe down the outside and all the button with a damp soapy cloth.
Fridge
Your fridge deals with a lot from fruits, vegetables, raw and cooked meats and that’s before you think about potential gems on containers that you have picked up from shelves in the supermarket. We place items in the fridge to keep them fresh but often forget to keep the fridge itself fresh!
Tips on Cleaning: Main thing to keep on top of is not leaving rotten food in your fridge, make sure you get rid as soon as. Don’t be lazy take all the shelves out and even on the ones on the door and wash in hot soapy water and dry properly before placing back and a few overlooked spots you might miss is if you have one of these fancy fridges with a water dispenser its uber important to clean your filter and all around this mechanism as stagnant water is not good also vent usually near the bottom and easy to get clogged with sloppy water.
Sponges
One of the most common places in your Family kitchen for bacteria to breed is on your sponges. There’s no need to get all paranoid, many of the bacteria on the sponge won’t harm you but with that said its real important to clean your sponge regularly as a few of them can make you ill and its worth remembering using dish washing liquid to clean sponges has no effect on molds, yeasts and E. coli.
Tips on Cleaning: The quickest and easiest way to clean your sponge is squeeze it out and pop it in the microwave on full heat for 2 mins, added bonus is the steam from the sponge will loosen any dried on food inside your microwave too!
Can Opener
Guilty…. I can cant remember the last time I gave my can opener a real good clean, but by rights we really should get into the habit of cleaning it straight after using it a it’s the perfect place for things like mold, salmonella and E. coli to grow.
Tips on Cleaning: If you have a dishwasher easiest thing is just to place your can opener in here after each use, and some dishwasher have a sanitizer mode so that’s even better. Failing that to give your can opener a real good clean you can use bicarbonate soda and warm water.
