Based in Manchester, Marie is one of the writers at HouseFresh and our resident dust expert. She works together with our in-house researchers and our Managing Editor to produce in-depth articles offering practical advice on how to tackle indoor air quality issues.
There’s nothing finer than a home-cooked meal. But all of your hard work can easily be ruined if all those cooking smells linger around afterward. Yes, a delicious meal can result in a pong that lives on throughout your household for days, if not dealt with correctly.
So, we’ve put together a multitude of tips and tricks to help you get rid of those unwanted odors.
Before You Cook: How to Minimize Smells From Traveling Outside Your Kitchen
More often than not, what you do before you start cooking can affect the aroma you create. So why not give yourself a head start.
1. Close doors
When ingredients are thrown into a boiling pan over a pool of olive oil, scents will burst into life, quickly filling the room with flavorsome steam. That steam, like any cooking odor, really wants to escape the kitchen and take over the rest of your house.
So this one is simple — closing your kitchen, dining, and living room doors will trap the odors.
| PRO TIP: Place a towel down at the bottom of the kitchen door to fully block in the smells and stop them from spreading to the rest of your home. |
2. Sprinkle baking soda into your trash can
Occasionally, we get lucky and the bin is full of remnants, ingredients, and leftovers so we can take out the trash immediately. But not always. If the meal you’ve just cooked has a particularly potent smell, then your trash will stink.
Sprinkling baking soda into the trash before cooking will absorb odors and minimize the smell from spreading. Baking soda is composed of a sodium cation and a bicarbonate anion. With most kitchen odors being acidic, it’s perfect for eradicating these smells.
| PRO TIP: If you’re a cat owner and don’t have baking soda to hand, kitty litter will also do the odorizing trick. |
3. Boil vinegar and water on the stove
Simply add half a cup of vinegar and half a cup of water to a saucepan and slowly boil it before you begin cooking. The mixture of both will create a steam that absorbs scents and prevents them from spreading around your kitchen. The acetic acid in white vinegar has been proven to absorb odors very effectively.
| PRO TIP: Other things you can simmer and leave to boil whilst you cook include: 🍊 Orange skins 🍋 Lemon peels ☕ Cinnamon sticks 🌺 Potpourri |
4. Ventilate the kitchen
Most kitchens these days have an extractor fan — we suggest you use it while you’re cooking up a stinky storm. Also, if your kitchen door is closed and the rest of your home is relatively shut off, open some windows and back doors. Doing this will improve your kitchen scent by allowing the outdoor air in and once the cooking starts, it will feel much fresher.
| PRO TIP: Leave that ventilator fan on for at least an hour after cooking. |
5. Put lemons in your garbage disposal
Throwing lemon bits and peels into your garbage disposal (that blade mechanism located inside your sink) will release the lemony aroma around your kitchen, killing odors and breaking up blockage through the power of citric acid.
Lemons and limes contain citric acid which can act as an odor eliminator and a cleanser. It can also dissolve small pieces of food and grease from your drains.
| PRO TIP: Pro tip – Soda crystals are another great product to break up food and disperse odor in the kitchen: 🤏 Sprinkle a handful of crystals down your garbage disposal ⏲️ Leave for 10 minutes 💧 Wash away with hot water |
While You Cook: How to Keep Odors at Bay When Cooking 5 Smelly Foods
Many foods and dishes give off different smells that can be approached differently when it comes to dispersing them from your kitchen. Other than waiting for the smell to simply disappear, these tips will help tackle them before they have the chance to spread around your home.
From the smell of burnt toast to a heavily spiced-up curry, we’ve got you covered.
1. Fish
Seafood, more often than not, is considered to be one of the worst odors when cooking. Although lighting a chef’s candle and opening windows while cooking will help the stench a little, you can also try these tried and tested hacks:
🐟 Hack # 1: Leave a bowl of white vinegar out overnight — Vinegar’s acetic acid content has the ability to absorb unwanted odors.
🐟 Hack # 2: Simmer lemon peels or ground ginger — The steam produced releases the odor of the lemons into the air, acting as a natural air freshener.
2. Curry
Opening spice jars, chopping herbs, crushing garlic, and spilling ingredients over your countertops. Yes, cooking a curry is often an action-packed process with an assortment of herbs and spices — all of which are great at leaving lingering odors around your home for days.
Try this, it’s what we like to call: The Potato Hack:
🥔 Step 1: Rinse some potatoes and chop them in half
🥔 Step 2: Place them in a dish on your counter-top
🥔 Step 3: Sprinkle them with table salt and leave them there as you cook
Unlike other common vegetables, potatoes contain multiple microscopic starch granules which can soak up all types of cooking flavors, water, and even odors.
| PRO TIP: This tip is also super effective after cooking — place potatoes into the pan you have just cooked curry in and leave it for a few hours, the smell will be absorbed into the potatoes. |
3. Bacon
One great tip for dispersing the smell of bacon grease is to make your own aromatherapy spray.
Spraying your countertops and stove after cooking with a homemade spray will reduce the unwanted food smells from multiplying.
It’s super simple to make a spray:
🥓 Step 1: Fill three-quarters of a spray bottle with water
🥓 Step 2: Add 2-3 teaspoons of rubbing alcohol
🥓 Step 3: Add 10-15 drops of essential oils
Pro tip – These essential oil flavors will work well as they are all-natural aromas with pungent scents.
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4. Italian Cuisine
Fresh garlic, onions, peppers, and tomatoes will all burst with flavorsome aromas as soon as the cooking begins.
🍝 Cut a lemon in half, get some fresh rosemary, and simply add it to boiling water and allow the steam to fill your indoor kitchen space. Rosemary, similar to eucalyptus, has a beautiful pinewood-type scent that when boiled alongside lemons releases a nice aroma.
5. Burnt toast?
The stink of burnt toast can linger around the house for some time. A great way to tackle this particular odor is simply to leave an open cup or bowl of coffee grounds out on your countertop for a couple of hours.
🍞 Aromatic compounds can be broken down by acidic java, making coffee grounds a handy odor eliminator.
Bonus Tip: Clean as you go
This one works for any dish. Cleaning as you go will diminish the odor of lingering smells, so here are five cleaning hacks to implement next time you hit the kitchen.
🧼 Hack # 1: Use towels – Paper towels are great for soaking up spills and avoiding mess around the kitchen, but re-useable towels are better for the environment and just as effective. I use bamboo ones, and they work great!
🧼 Hack # 2: For preparation use a garbage bowl – Grab yourself a large bowl in the kitchen and save multiple trips to the garbage can by having a mini version right by your side.
🧼 Hack # 3: Clean up spills and mess instantly – If you crack an egg and it goes all over the stove or spill some Italian sauce all down your cooker, deal with it right away. Don’t give stains a chance, wipe them up instantly.
🧼 Hack # 4: Use a splatter screen – Some food when cooking can splitter all over the place, using a splatter screen will help prevent that. Place it over your cooking pots and see what a difference it will make.
🧼 Hack # 5: Soak your utensils in hot water – Soaking your utensils after use will only benefit the process. More often than not you need to reuse your utensils, so plan ahead and let them soak.
After You Cook: 6 Ways to Get Rid of Cooking Odors
The most important part of fully getting rid of cooking odors depends on what you do after you cook. Taking out the trash for sure will eliminate the stench of leftovers but is that enough?
More often than not, when we’re cooking, we become a little immune to the smell of food due to constant exposure. Here are some great tips on how to get rid of food odor after you cook. Oh, and these tips also apply to other mysterious odors that may be lingering around your home.
1. Turn on an air purifier
Air purifiers are a fantastic way to eliminate odor! But not all models are designed to tackle this issue. From being a bit of a geek in the air purification world, you learn which units do what and for odor elimination, you want a product that features an activated charcoal carbon filter.
Carbon filters will trap cooking odors and after time help disperse the smell altogether. The odor will attach to loose pieces of bonded carbon and be broken up through filtration.
| PRO TIP: Not all air purifiers equipped with carbon filters will do the job. To help eradicate the smell of cooking odor via an air purifier, you will need to do a bit of research into what unit works and will function best in your home, taking into consideration the size of your kitchen space. 🤓 This is our list of the best air purifiers for cooking odors, but if you don’t have time check out the top 3 below. If budget is a prime concern, then be sure to take a look at our Levoit Core 300 review as this unit performs but costs less than $100. |
2. Clean your oven, cooking surfaces and countertops with an antibacterial spray
Wipe down your kitchen surfaces. We all know that after a meal the kitchen can be a bit messy. Spray your surfaces and stove with antibacterial spray and give it a thorough clean to prevent any odors from sticking around longer than you’d like them to.
You can also use homemade sprays infused with odor-elimination ingredients such as lemons or lavender.
| PRO TIP: If there’s an odor lingering inside your cooker from a previous meal, place some lemons on a baking tray and bake for an hour to help keep your oven smelling fresh. |
3. Wash your pots and pans properly
Sometimes either during or after a meal your pots and pans can burn. The combination of these two smells will create a whole new scent that is not nice to have around your home.
So be sure to soak your pots and pans thoroughly with hot water and use specific household products that remove grease effectively. Dishwasher detergent is designed to remove stains and burn marks from particular cooking materials, so this will help tremendously to loosen these staining problems.
| PRO TIP: Soda crystals are another great way to remove stains from kitchen materials — the alkaline neutralizes all things greasy combined with hot water. |
4. Use aromatherapy and scented candles
Oil diffusers and scented candles work super effectively (as long as you’ve cleaned up too). Similar to air purifiers, they play a great role in keeping odor at bay, however cleaning your kitchen by removing grease or leftover food is very important. When the candle burns out, you don’t want old food odor kicking back in.
| PRO TIP: Look for products that contain extracts of geranium or basil to ignite a powerful floral aroma to replace the cooking odors. |
5. Open kitchen windows and doors
Allowing the fresh air in will only increase the chances of helping with the smell. Give your room some outdoor fresh air after you’ve cleaned, taken out the trash, and removed other unwanted odors.
| PRO TIP: If you own an air purifier, don’t open the windows and doors while it’s running. Either use an air purifier before you introduce fresh air, or after to maximize both tips effectively. |
6. Bake yourself a dessert
This is a great excuse to treat yourself to something sweet after a nice dinner. After a long and exotic spicy meal, introducing the smell of a freshly baked pie or a tray of double chocolate brownies will no doubt cancel out previous odors and replace them with something divine.
🍰 The smell of baked bread or cocoa powder oven cooking releases a malty or caramelized aroma as opposed to an allicin odor foursome savory meals.
Common Questions About Cooking Smells
🤔 How can I prevent my clothes from smelling like the food I’m cooking?
Using heat or cold treatments often helps with dispersing odor when it’s lingering on fabric. Washing clothes with fabric softener and setting them outside to blow dry will have great results. However, pretreating fabrics with baking soda is also a great way to protect your clothes from cooking odors. Place your clothes in the sink or a bucket with hot water and add baking soda.
🤔 How can I eliminate the bad smell in my dishes and drinking glasses?
If you’re experiencing a bad smell on your dishes and glasses, try running hot water and filling your sink until the glasses and dishes are relatively submerged and add 2\3 cups of white vinegar. After 30 minutes remove the items and scrub them with a clean sponge, then dry them with a clean dish towel for the best results.
🤔 Why is my dishwasher so stinky?
In most cases, dishwasher odors are usually caused by some form of buildup or blockage, so a bit of maintenance may be required. Check the filter for any sign of blockage and clean it if necessary. The spray arm is usually detachable so check to see if everything is running smoothly and clean if needs be. Clean around the edges of the seals to see if there is any build-up of any kind, and run a rinse wash with vinegar or baking soda.
Final thoughts
For many people, cooking during the Covid lockdown became a fun and experimental pastime. The odor that lingers after we cook however is a problem we would all like to eradicate, so don’t get put off by the thought of your home smelling after a nice meal. These steps above will help diminish any unwanted smells, keeping your home smelling fresh and full of life.
Last update on 2023-09-22 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API