Toothpaste and kitchen essentials: Reviving your silverware
Before the holidays, we pull out cutlery from the drawer that we had forgotten about until now. Even the most attractive spoons and forks lose their charm if they are covered with streaks and build-up. Instead of immediately reaching for chemical agents, take a look in the bathroom and kitchen cabinets.
19 November 2024 13:44
Forgotten, dusty, and coated with residue, cutlery can be easily restored to an almost perfect state. Toothpaste is not only an essential part of the morning and evening routine but also a practical means to make spoons look new and gleam with cleanliness. Thanks to the gentle particles in the toothpaste, you can effectively remove discolouration and shine cutlery. All you need is toothpaste, a soft brush, and a few minutes of patience to make spoons, forks, and knives look like new.
Cleaning cutlery - Toothpaste trick
Toothpaste is not just a product for oral hygiene but also an excellent cleaning agent for many surfaces, including silver cutlery. Its gentle abrasives efficiently remove discolourations and give the silver a shine.
Pour about 1 litre of water into a pot, add a tablespoon of baking soda and a teaspoon of sugar, and bring to a boil. Then add a tablespoon of toothpaste and mix thoroughly. Drop the cutlery inside and boil for 10 minutes. After this time, remove them from the pot and polish them with a clean cloth. They will shine like new. This way, you won’t overspend on polishers.
How to clean silver cutlery?
You'll find many products in your kitchen cabinets that will work for household cleaning. Salt and aluminium foil can restore the former shine to silver cutlery. Compared to other methods of cleaning silver, such as using polishing pastes or specialised chemical agents, the method using salt and aluminium foil is natural and economical.
Line a bowl with aluminium foil, pour in 5 tablespoons of table salt, and fill with about 1 litre of boiling water. Drop the cutlery inside and leave it for a few hours. Thanks to this method, even heavily tarnished cutlery will regain its shine.
How does it work? Cleaning silver cutlery using salt and aluminium foil is based on a chemical reaction. The table salt and hot water and aluminium create an electrolytic solution. The silver cutlery then acts as the cathode, and the aluminium foil as the anode. As a result of the oxidation-reduction reaction, the tarnish is transferred from the silver to the aluminium foil, restoring the cutlery to its natural shine.
