Get rid of those pesky cooking odours
Bacon. Cauliflower. Seafood. Anything fried. While their aromas can be enticing in the moment, no one wants to smell these foods hours or even days after they've been cooked and consumed.
“When we put things in our mouth and we get the odour, the brain can interpret it as food,” said Dani Reed, chief science officer of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But things change once you've stopped chewing. “The brain puts a different interpretation on the same smell,” sometimes in a negative way.
“Getting rid of cooking odours is both super simple and impossible,” Reed said. “The odours of cooking, especially the sort of the fried fishy type of odours, they permeate different surfaces and then they're released over time.”
When you're cooking, especially if you're frying, open a window or exterior door and turn on an exhaust fan (if you have one that vents outside).
Open floor plans are all the rage in modern home design, but the downside is that those unwanted odours have access to all of the rugs, curtains, couches, pillows and other absorbent surfaces in your living area. If you have a kitchen with a door, close it to keep cooking odours from spreading.
“Also, always shut the bedroom door,” said chef and cookbook author Abra Berens. That can make a big difference for people in apartments or smaller residences.
The longer food lingers out in the open, the more its aroma has time to infiltrate the air. So, try to clean up as soon as possible instead of letting dirty dishes linger. And for frying oil that you're waiting to cool before it can be put away or disposed of, cover the pan with a lid to keep the odours trapped inside until you're ready to deal with the oil.
There are a few different available products that can easily trap smelly molecules. The first is common air-freshener spray products.
“Sprays like Febreze do more than just cover up smelly molecules with even more pungent ones,” science writer Rachel Feltman wrote. “They use chemical compounds called cyclodextrins to literally trap odour molecules.”
Another option is activated carbon, which can be found in air purifiers and specific odour-absorbing splatter screens. Also referred to as activated charcoal, active charcoal and active carbon, it works “by using a physical stickiness that is essentially chemistry-blind,” former chemistry professor Robert L. Wolke wrote. “Gases find their way into its enormous interior network of microscopic pores, where they stick by a phenomenon called adsorption.”
What about the box of baking soda many people have in their refrigerator? Can you just set one out on the counter? Long story short, it's not very effective and doesn't work for all types of smells (unlike activated carbon).
“The landing pad for a smellicule on a box of baking soda is a mere seven square inches (the box-top area), secreted somewhere within a 20 cubic foot refrigerator air space,” Wolke wrote. “That's not a very efficient system for capturing smellicules. The open box does not attract odours, as many people believe.”
Vinegar is another tool in your arsenal, and its odour absorption has been promoted by social media cooking and cleaning influencer Barbara Costello.
She suggests setting a bowl of it next to the stove while cooking to neutralize odours. However, it can take some time and may need to be left out for a few hours and up to overnight for particularly potent smells.