Fix Stinky Food Containers With This Cheap Pantry Staple (It's Not Baking Soda)

Plastic food containers are both cheap and convenient these days, offering cheap and simple storage solutions for leftovers in your fridge or dry items in the pantry. But they're not without their problems. Apart from figuring out how to organize those pesky plastic lids, the containers themselves may end up holding onto old food odors that make them unappealing to keep using. The smell is not always easy to clean out with simple soap and water. However, there is an effective fix you may have never even heard of before: using the water leftover from rinsing your rice.

To start with, if you haven't been rinsing your rice before cooking, you should be doing that. Rinsing rice gets rid of extra starch and any other debris. Rinsing also ensures your rice doesn't stick together when it's done cooking. If you're making sticky rice or risotto, then this isn't necessary, but for a nice, fluffy rice, rinsing is key. Normally, that water just goes right down the drain. However, that starchy water is slightly acidic and abrasive, which means it has some impeccable cleaning qualities for common problems around the house.

Think of rice water like a diluted version of vinegar and baking soda. It can tackle a lot of the same cleaning tasks. If you let it soak in one of your used food storage containers for 30 minutes and then finish cleaning it out with soap and water, it should remove any residual odor.

People in China and other rice-producing countries have been saving their rice water for years for this purpose. It can be used to clean dishes, mineral deposits on your shower door, faucets, and even the toilet. However, while rice water is good for cleaning certain surfaces, it has no grease cutting abilities. You wouldn't want to try to tackle greasy pots and pans with rice water. 

Rice water is acidic, which means even if you mixed it with a grease-cutting soap, it would end up being less effective because the rice water would neutralize the cleaning power. Your best bet is to use soap and warm water to clean up a greasy container first and then, if you're still worried about odors, let it soak in the rice water.

If you have more rice water than you need for cleaning, you still don't need to dump it. Rice rinse water has a number of other uses that are worth looking into, including cleaning fish because it helps reduce smell there, too. For it to be even more effectiveness, opt for short or long grain white rice and avoid using rinse water from brown or basmati. If nothing else, your plants will love it.