Eliminate Smelly Kitchen Odors With This Creamy Sandwich Spread

The kitchen is a sacred place where delicious meals and satisfying snacks are kept. However, even some of the best food brings about some of the worst smells to come out of the kitchen. You don't have to live like this, though, and you don't have to run to the store to buy some flowery-smelling can of chemicals to spray around to clear the funk. Just head over to your pantry and grab the most uniquely American sandwich ingredient — peanut butter.

If you haven't heard of using peanut butter to eliminate foul kitchen odors, don't overlook this holy grail. Add about a tablespoon of peanut butter (a little more or less won't hurt) to a pan and bring it to a sizzle for a few minutes or so before turning the heat off again. Whatever monstrosity that was waging war against your sniffer will be replaced with the lovely, mild, and nutty scent left behind by your bubbling peanut butter. This strategy works particularly well for preventing the smell of seafood from taking over your home. Next time you are frying up some fish, add a bit of peanut butter to the oil. This will reduce the potentially unpleasant smell that accompanies such a pleasant meal.

Peanut butter is good for deodorizing, preventing odors, and even removing the stinky food smell off your hands, but the magic of peanut butter goes even beyond that. The smell of peanut butter is more complex than one might assume. It's made up of hundreds of molecules that affect how we process information related to smell. The reaction in our brains to the odor of peanut butter makes it ideal for things like aiding in the detection of early-stage Alzheimer's, as it's not an easily forgotten scent in someone with a healthy functioning sense of smell. It's also one of several commonly used scents for retraining the sense of smell if it's been lost or reduced.

The complexities of peanut butter and the power of its scent make it ideal for covering lingering kitchen smells that are no longer appetizing, even if they were before. Kitchen smells don't always start off bad, but what smells good to someone when they're hungry may not smell as good once that person has eaten and is no longer craving that particular food. Instead of living with the smell for hours as it lingers and spreads throughout your home, neutralize the smell with peanut butter so you can start the whole process again with new ingredients and smells. Or just start craving peanut butter.