How A Bread Bag Tag Can Help You Clean

We've been known to geek out on the topic of the best bread for French toast and to scrupulously compare freshness and pricing between loaves from frequent stomping grounds like Aldi and Kroger. The tags on our bagged bread, however, normally don't merit much attention. Yes, it's true that their color means something useful, and that's a cool little food-nerd secret, but we generally just trash these widgets when our bread is down to the last heel. Turns out, however, that maybe such a cavalier attitude was a mistake all along.

Bread tags might just be an insider hack for the cleanest kitchen ever. Have you ever mutilated the hard edge of an old credit or debit card when scraping mystery gunk off your pantry shelves or, worse yet, scratched at it by hand? Are you plagued by kids with sticky fingers leaving gooey effluvia on your table and walls? The rigid edge of a bread tag is a surprisingly effective tool for scraping sludge, crud, dirt, or grime off all those kitchen surfaces that seem to attract them like magnets.

That goes double for tricky, hard-to-reach corners where filth likes to build up, like the recesses of your stove or the seams between your fridge's water filter and the cabinetry. Haunted by caked-on crud in the corners of your cookie sheets? Not any longer, buster. Bread tags are little but mighty, and they work a treat at scraping off ick in a way that preserves both fragile fingernails. Clean freaks unite! Bread tags are here to save the day.

Our recommendation is that you dedicate a resealable storage bag or small reusable container to holding bread tags in your kitchen junk drawer ASAP. Shove aside all that other ephemera taking up valuable real estate alongside the chip clips and miniature flashlights and give those plastic prizes a place to call their own. Save every one that you come across, because the beauty of using these plastic gizmos on spills and seepage is that you can toss them as soon as you use them up. Sure, you could wash and reuse a bread tag that's covered in sourdough, spilled waffle batter, dried-up honey, or any other cooking mess, but why would you? Reusing the bread tags once is already more environmentally conscious than most folks will ever get, so don't feel bad about dirtying them up and trashing them.

There may be a nutritional difference in whole grain versus wheat bread, but, for our money, the colorful bread tags all work the same. We thoroughly enjoy a good hack in which "trash" otherwise bound for the bin gains a second life, and it doesn't get more mundane and useless than a bread bag clip. Putting these to good use is not only deeply satisfying, but we bet you'll also love the utility of it. These little suckers really do a bang-up job at scraping off yuckiness that might otherwise bedevil you while working to maintain a clean cooking space.