The Medicine Cabinet Staple That Can Tackle Even The Toughest Food Stains

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Cleaning gurus know that anhydrous citric acid and sodium bicarbonate — aka baking soda – count among the best natural kitchen cleaners around. If you're inclined to use fewer chemicals in your cleaning routine, you could pick these two items up on your next trip to the drugstore or grocery store. And if you're also inclined to save time, money, and resources, just look in your medicine chest for some Alka Seltzer. Here's why: Your favorite tummy calmer contains sodium bicarbonate and anhydrous citric acid in one convenient tablet, allowing you to scrub caked-on food and grape juice stains off your dishes, pots and pans, and kitchen counters.

Citric acid can be found naturally in citrus fruits, like lemon and lime. It is tough on stains and functions as a mild bleach. Citric acid additionally boasts antibacterial and antiviral properties, making it a natural for cleaning. Unbelievably, it isn't actually an exaggeration to say that it's powerful enough to clean up nuclear waste. 

As for why you should embrace baking soda cleaning hacks, the reasons are myriad. Chief among them is sodium bicarbonate's grittiness. Its abrasive quality scrubs deep down into the tiny pores of ceramic mugs and plates and scratches through the food that's caked on your dishes. Another way to use baking soda in cleaning is to sprinkle it around when you need to tackle odors in the kitchen. This is one reason why people keep an open box of it in the fridge. It soaks up the yucky smells that can eventually make your food taste bad. When you clean your kitchen with Alka Seltzer, you concentrate the cleaning power of both natural cleaners into one spot.

Given that you work with food in the kitchen, the potential for messes runs high. The same goes for stains, when you consider that items like coffee, blueberries, turmeric, and red wine are stored in the kitchen. And it goes without saying that old food that's stuck onto those days-old dirty dishes always requires a lot of elbow grease to get rid of. Thankfully, science can once again come to our rescue.

You can start by using Alka Seltzer to break through the stains in your coffee urns and ceramic coffee mugs. This way, you can avoid cleaning these household items with bleach and give them a good treatment with the tummy bubbler instead. An Alka Seltzer tablet combined with hot water is usually enough to drive the stains out of coffee mugs and tea cups. It's good for cleaning coffee pots, too. You just need to add four Alka Seltzer tablets to 10 ounces of water. Once they dissolve, run the concoction through the coffee pot. This hack easily replaces white vinegar as a cleaning agent. 

Those acid-relieving bubbles that are great for your upset stomach bring the same scrubbing and fizzing action to a casserole dish that's caked with crusty, baked-on mac and cheese bits. Tackling this task requires you to fill the pan or pot to the brim with steaming hot water – enough to reach the caked-on food. A couple of tablets of Alka Seltzer and a time lapse of an hour or two is usually enough to break apart the leftover food, making it easier to clean afterward.