Bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda is useful and versatile substance, and good for anyone who suffers from allergies to cleaning products. Used in the right way, it removes the need to buy so many chemical-laden cleaning materials.
Something like it has been known for a long time. The Ancient Egyptians used a substance called natron as a kind of soap. Natron is essentially a naturally occurring mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate. But baking soda for cooking has only really been commercially available since the mid nineteenth century, when two bakers from New York developed the process of creating baking soda from sodium carbonate and carbon dioxide.
If you want to get best use from this amazing substance, don’t buy the tiny packs on the baking ingredients shelves at the supermarket. It’s best to ask at the drugstore or chemist for packets of 125 grams (half a pound) or more. It’s worth taking the trouble to decant it into a dry jar, because it has so many uses around the home.
Here are just ten selected ways in which to use it at home – apart from in cooking, of course!
Personal Health and Hygiene
- If you are prone to suffer from insect bites, bicarbonate of soda made into a paste and applied to the itch should help relieve the irritation and discomfort.
- If you have a stubborn splinter which will not come out, make a paste of bicarbonate of soda and water, and apply it to the splinter. Cover the splinter with a sticky plaster for a couple of hours. The paste should draw out the splinter and solve the problem.
- You may feel it is unhygienic to constantly be putting your toothbrush away while it is wet, particularly if you are travelling. Bicarbonate of soda will clean it – just sprinkle a little on the brush and rinse off in running water, then dry thoroughly. You can also clean hair brushes in a similar way.
- Bee stings are acid and bicarbonate of soda is strongly alkaline. Therefore, if you make a paste with it together with a little water, and apply it to the bee sting, it will negate the effect of the sting and reduce the pain.
- An inexpensive foot bath can be had by filling a basin with hot water, adding four tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda and soaking the feet. Finish off the cleaning process by scrubbing hard skin off with a pumice stone.
Hygiene Around the Home
- If you are troubled with ants in the home, sprinkle baking soda over the path which the ants take. If you cannot spot the ants’ path, put bicarbonate of soda inside the bottom of the door frame, to stop them where they enter your house.
- Cockroaches are among the most unpleasant pests and are hard to eliminate in apartment blocks or any buildings with networks of conduits and pipes. Always clear up food mess and crumbs, but you can also discourage the pests by mixing equal quantities of bicarbonate of soda and sugar, and sprinkling in dark and inaccessible corners where the nasty pests like to linger.
- When cleaning kitchen pedal bins, put a couple of tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda into the hot cleaning water.
- It is one of the very best ways of stopping a refrigerator from smelling. Dissolve 4 tablespoons in a bowl of hot water, and clean the inside of the fridge with this mixture. And, try leaving a small dish of baking soda in the fridge to absorb smells from foodstuffs like fish.
- To clean off burned on food from pans –not aluminium ones, though – fill the pan with hot water, add soda to the hot water and it leave to soak for an hour before completing the cleaning.
Warning
Now, a warning. Do not mix baking soda with any other form of soda. Washing soda is a strong soda which is even better for cleaning than baking soda. It is not edible and often comes in crystal form. Caustic soda should not be touched with the bare hands but it is hard to beat it for clearing greased-up drains and blocked sinks. Take advice on the best ways in which to use these two products.
Oh – and don't forget: do not use any form of soda on aluminium. Soda attacks the protective oxide layer of aluminium, which is a highly reactive metal.
Jennifer Woolf - Jennifer Woolf
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