This simple trick gets tomato stains out of plastic containers in seconds

Spaghetti night is all fun and games until you realize the leftover Bolognese is staining your favorite food storage container bright orange. If you’ve ever wondered why that happens, here’s the shortest explanation you’ll ever read: All tomatoes, particularly cooked and canned ones, contain a highly pigmented antioxidant called lycopene. Lycopene is water-repellent, and when stored in an equally water-repellent container, it bonds to the container, creating that unsightly ring around your leftovers.

The consequences are even worse when hot leftovers go into the plastic before they get a chance to cool, opening the pores of the plastic and making them perfect for all of that pigment to seep in. Luckily, the method for fixing this problem is just as easy to explain:

1. Identify all of your stained containers.
2. Fill them halfway with warm water. The warm water will help open those plastic pores again, making your cleaning job that much easier.
3. Add a few drops of grease-soluble dish soap, like Dawn or Palmolive. Dish soap is naturally both grease-soluble and water-soluble, meaning it will attach to the grease without staying attached to the plastic container.
4. Crumple a sheet of paper towel and toss that in the container too. The paper towel will add some abrasion to the equation and allow for some manual scrubbing to help dislodge the grease.
5. Put the lid on the container and shake it for about 30 seconds. The water will prep the stain to be lifted, the paper towel will scrub the container, and the grease-cutting dish soap will do most of the hard work.
6. Rinse and reveal. Toss the paper towel in the trash and rinse the container to reveal your bright, shiny, stain-free masterpiece.

To help keep your containers in tip-top shape, let your leftovers cool to room temperature before packing them up and storing them in the refrigerator. Adding room-temperature food to the container will make the plastic pores less likely to open, making them less susceptible to staining. Another easy fix is to switch to glass containers where you can.