Cleaning Vegetable Oil

Built-up vegetable oil splatter can be very hard to clean off of surfaces, if they aren’t cleaned right away. Typically, with a pan, you can soak it in hot water with a bit of hand-washing detergent and the oil will lift from the surface. Unfortunately, a soak in the sink isn’t always possible.

There are a few solutions that you can try, but always remember to spot test any solution somewhere that a stain won’t be visible, just in case the surface that you’re using it on is sensitive to the solution that you’re trying.

Baking soda is a common solution. One can either work it into a paste with some water and put it on top of the stain, or wet a sponge and scrub (gently!) with it. Citrus-based cleaners also seem to cut through oil remarkably well. There are a number of these to choose from at the grocery store, unless you’re brave enough to make your own.

Dish soap for hand washing can also work very well. Of course, whatever you use, it’s important to follow the care instructions for what you’re using. Take care not to stain or wear away at the surface in your efforts to clean it.

For a large vegetable oil spill, soak up the excess before attempting to clean the spill. Kitty litter can work well as an absorbent agent.

It may surprise you to know that with all the difficulties you may experience cleaning up vegetable oil, it is an ingredient in many of the cleaning products you currently use!

Palm oil, in particular, is very popular in cleaning products, including soap. (It’s even picking up quite a following in the food world, due to its excellent consistency and its lack of trans fats.)

In the past, soaps were typically made using lard or other types of animal fat, such as tallow. But now that vegetable oils are so inexpensive and easy to access, most soap makers use them instead. Palm oil makes such an excellent lather and such a nice firm bar of soap, that it is often referred to as “vegetable tallow.”

Although it is commonly confused with palm kernel oil and coconut oil, the three oils have, in fact, very different properties, whether one is attempting to make soap or a tasty meal.

Palm oil is such a great cleaner, as a matter of fact, that were you to pull the cleansers out of your cleaning closet right now, (if your cleaning closet is representative of the current marketplace, anyway) about fifty percent of those products should contain palm oil as an ingredient.

Other oils are also often used in soaps, too. Olive oil, jojoba oil, sunflower oil, and even soybean oil are regular ingredients in homemade soap, even if not all of them are as big in the larger marketplace as palm oil is.

At any rate, whether you’re cleaning it up, or cleaning with it (or quite possibly both at once!), vegetable oils are everywhere.