Neutralize Strong Food Smells Naturally With A Kitchen Ingredient

Apples can make your house smell super tasty when you're baking them in a dessert, but they're also a great remedy when you need to deodorize your smelly kitchen. This fruit's odor-absorbing qualities come from its polyphenol compounds, which, according to a 2020 study published in Plants, can reduce the smell of fish by up to 70%. There are a couple of ways you can work with apples to remove unpleasant smells from your kitchen, whether they're from leftover fish or the science experiment growing on the bottom shelf of your fridge.

The easiest solution is just to slice some up. The slices don't need to be small — halves or quarters will work just fine. Once they're sliced, put them in a bowl and place it in the fridge or near the stove, wherever the smell originated. Ridding the area of the unfortunate scent could take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

Apples' odor-reducing properties are so significant that some have even used the fruit as a non-chemical solution to reduce bad smells in cars (If you've left one too many fast food bags in your car's trash container, you know of what we speak here). Even the biggest SUVs have relatively small interiors, and fortunately, apples deodorize best in tight spaces, including the stove and fridge.

There's a reason that fresh-baked apple pies smell so good. The combination of heat, sugar, and pectin swirl around in the air to create the delicious, familiar scent. However, apples do more than just create good smells and blanket bad ones. They slurp them up, so to speak, and make the bad smells disappear. To accomplish this clever deodorizing hack, cut up a few apples into quarters. Toss them into a pot of boiling water and allow it to simmer for 15 minutes or so. For extra-foul odor remediation, put some cinnamon in the pot, too. If you'd like a more potent cocktail of pleasant scents, you can also add some cloves, orange peels, and vanilla.

This trick also works in the oven. Set it to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and place your quartered apples into a baking dish with your spices of choice. Let them cook for 45 minutes. If the apples threaten to dry out, splash a bit of water on them to perk them back up. And voila! Getting rid of stinky odors in 60 minutes or less is just a few chops away.