It’s the item on every cleaning list that inspires the most apprehension: the dreaded kitchen cleaning.
If you are not the tidiest cook, then take comfort in the knowledge that you’re not alone. Between errant crumbs, stubborn grease stains, and that one mysterious sticky spot, it can seem like keeping up with the cleaning is an impossible task.
That’s why we’ve come up with this handy list of kitchen cleaning tips.
10 Kitchen Cleaning Tips to Make Your Life Easier
A clean kitchen workspace is essential to your health and the health of your family. That doesn’t mean you need to drive yourself mad just to keep the kitchen clean, though.
Cooking should be an enjoyable activity, and these simple tricks will help keep things tidy and help keep you sane.
1. Keep Your Set-Up Minimal
This is one are we could all stand to work on.
Ideally, you should keep your counter clutter to the absolute minimum. Most of use, though, tend to fill up our counters with appliances, cutlery, spice jars, and a multitude of other odds and ends.
Unfortunately, while this may seem like a matter of convenience, it ultimately ends up being self-defeating.
Overstocking our counters just provides more nooks and crannies for crumbs and detritus to hide in. And by taking up all the space, we end up confining prep work to a tiny corner of the space that should be available to us, making it easier for spills and accidents to happen.
Not to mention that psyching yourself up to clean the counters after every meal is much easier when you don’t have to move dozens of little things to clean around and under them.
While no one wants to go through their cabinets trying to find space for everything, it is an investment that will make your everyday cooking so much easier and more enjoyable.
2. Start Clean, Finish Clean
If you can help it, you should never start cooking unless your kitchen is already fairly clean. Aside from posing possible health hazards, you are only compounding the mess you will have to clean up later.
By contrast, if you start clean, you will be more motivated to keep it that way.
3. Set Up to Clean as You Go
Another good habit to get into is filling up a bowl with hot, soapy water before you start cooking any meal. This little trick helps consolidate soiled cutlery into one place, keeping the mess contained and making it easier to wash up all at once.
Along the same lines, if you have a dishwasher you should make sure that it is empty or nearly empty before you begin cooking. Nothing is as frustrating as being in the middle of cooking only to realize that you don’t have anywhere to put a dirtied pan or mixing bowl.
Ultimately you usually end up with a sink piled high with dirty dishes, or counters strewn with the same. Having a fresh dishwasher ready to go will help keep the mess contained.
4. Have a Bottle of Cleaner Ready to Go
Following the theme of being ready to clean as you go, it’s a good idea to have some cleaners handy to handle any incidental spills as they occur.
AspenClean offers complete, all natural cleaning kits for just such purposes. Shop our products to learn more.
5. Designate a Trash/Compost Bowl
A designated garbage bowl is a criminally underrated kitchen tool.
Instead of awkwardly trying to maneuver all you cuttings, scraps, or compostables to their proper places with just your hands is a recipe for a mess. And while those cute little robot vacuums might meet your general household needs, most of them aren’t up to cleaning up kitchen messes.
Plus consolidating all of your cooking waste into one vessel will save you time on multiple trips to the trash or compost bin, making your cooking time more efficient.
6. Spray or Grease Pans Over the Dishwasher
Despite your best efforts, oil sprays and grease always seem determined to go anywhere that they are not supposed to be.
A simple hack to solve this is to do your spraying over an open dishwasher. Any missed oil will be washed away when you run the washer at the end of the night. No harm, no foul.
7. Use a Splatter Screen
This is one many of us are guilty of not doing.
Because we can’t be bothered to track down the splatter screen or wash it at the end of the night, we wind up with grease splatter all around the stove anytime we go to fry or saute something.
But I promise it’s worth the extra minute or two if it means sparing yourself from having to
8. Spot Clean as You Go
Despite all precautions though, it is pretty much inevitable that accidents will happen.
The important thing is to address them immediately. Picking up any dropped scraps or cleaning any spills or splatters as they happen will mean less work at the end of your preparations.
9. Line Your Cutting Board with a Cutting Mat
It happens time and again, you’ve just gotten done prepping some veggies, only to end up dropping have of them on the floor when it comes time to add them to a saute pan or stew pot.
The solution is to put s flexible cutting mat on top of your cutting board. Instead of trying to awkwardly maneuver an unwieldy cutting board over your pan, you can just lift up the mat and funnel your prepped goods right in.
10. If You Have Time to Lean, You Have Time to Clean
Cooking usually ends up entailing a certain amount of downtime.
If you find yourself waiting for a pot of water to boil or an oven to pre-heat, take advantage of that time. Unload your dishwasher, stow utensils that you are done using, spot clean your counters, do whatever needs to be done.
They say a watched pot never boils anyway, so distract yourself by getting a head-start on the cleanup.
Develop Clean Habits
Keeping a clean kitchen mostly just comes down to practicing good habits in the kitchen. Cleaning only becomes daunting when we let the problem grow out of control.
Practicing these kitchen cleaning tips will help you become accustomed to keeping clean as you cook.
Be sure to view our other posts for more tips, advice, and interior design inspiration.