Cleaning hacks: Is tomato sauce the latest super-powered pantry cleaner?

We’ve tried hacks using lemons, vinegar, baking powder, salt, dishwasher tabs and even coke.

Now the cleaning blogs are trying to sell us on… Tomato sauce and ketchup as the ultimate pantry cleaning products.

But, I hear you cry, tomato sauce is usually the thing we’re using the cleaning products on !

Too true. Depending on the brand and the amount of vinegar in the stuff, ketchup and sauce can stain wool carpets, clothes, and even marble counters or grout if you leave it long enough.

While tomatoes are acidic, and ketchup includes vinegar, I have my doubts about splashing the stuff around my home.

Method: Much like the great Coke Cleaning fad of 2019, I have serious doubts about how effective the stuff is. It sounds like a gimmick.

But the one thing all the blogs seem to agree on is the stuff is good for cleaning is sliver, so I thought I’d give that a go.

If it can clean that, it’ll most likely work on other things like pots and pans or ceramics.

I’ll try plain sauce, then ketchup, then vinegar and finally, a purpose made silver cleaner, Silvo.

Sauce: I’m using good old Watties, and I’m not being stingy with the stuff.

A big blob on a paper towel rubbed straight on the blackened silver does shift a little of the darkness, but it’s not spotless.

Ketchup: The slightly more acidic Ketchup had much the same effect as the plain tomato sauce, lifted a little of the oxidisation, but didn’t really change too much.

Even after leaving it on for half an hour to an hour, nothing changed.

Vinegar: I’m expecting great things from my favourite cleaning product. I use this stuff everywhere in place of harsher chemicals.

Combined with baking soda, it’s a cheap as chips alternative to store bought detergents and scourers.

It’s not much of a silver cleaner though. While it again seems to lift a bit of the darkness out of the oxidisation, it’s not actually removing it. Bummer.

Silvo: It takes seconds to work with hardly any rubbing, which is important if your items are only silver plate.

It’s very smelly and messy, however, and I have no idea what the chemicals are doing to my skin… you wouldn’t want to leave it on your hands for too long, but it’s so effective you don’t use heaps — this tin has lasted me years, in fact, I can’t remember when we got it.

As ever, the end result is perfectly clean silver, which immediately makes it the winner for this specific job.

Conclusions: Obviously, not many folks have a lot of silver these days, but this wasn’t really about the silver, so much as the process of using tomato sauce to clean something.

Much like the idea of using coke as a cleaner, sauce will need cleaning after you used it, completely defeating the purpose. It also smells of tomato sauce, so if you are going to try it, you better love that smell.

Finally, it made next to no difference to the silver milk jug, it even struggled to lift the somewhat sticky dust.

Personally I think there’s only one place for ketchup around the home, which is on top of your fish and chips.

This article originally appeared on stuff.co.nz