Out of All the Places in Your Kitchen, You’re Probably Forgetting To Clean This One Spot

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of home chefs quite like the absolute mess that follows a holiday meal. Sometimes it feels as if cleaning your kitchen after a big dinner is an even taller task than the planning, shopping, and cooking that went into preparing it. And if you’re only hitting the major surfaces when you clean—floors, countertops, sinks, and stove covers—then you risk leaving behind grime and bacteria in a few key places. One of these oft-forgotten locations is the mouth of your faucet.

Lift the tip of the faucet and display it to the camera, you will reveal a crust of light brown mildew encasing the holes where water should typically flow from the spigot. It is an all-too disconcerting sight. With a clever little cleaning hack, we watch as the tan mystery substance is disseminated by the simple power of vinegar and a plastic bag.

Here’s how the trick works: Fill a plastic bag with vinegar and lift the open bag beneath the faucet until the spigot is fully submerged in the pungent fluid. The vinegar—being acidic in nature and capable of dissolving dirt, grease, and grime—will quickly destroy whatever’s living on that faucet, revealing a squeaky-clean and disinfected surface when you remove the bag.

Watching dirt on the faucet fade away in less than five seconds is oddly satisfying, and we can’t wait to use this cleaning hack on our own faucets.