Cleaning hack which sorts ketchup spills in seconds ‘works like magic’

Say goodbye to saucy smears on your countertops with this easy hack.

Almost all of us will have a bottle of ketchup in the kitchen that we use for elevating the flavour of our chips, adding to burgers, and squirting over our bacon sandwiches. The sauce is a versatile addition to many meals, and as such it has become a staple in homes up and down the country.

But if you’ve ever accidentally spilt some ketchup on your kitchen counter, you’ll know how much of a pain it is to clean.

Whether you’ve been clumsy yourself or you’ve got kids who just completely miss their plate, spills aren’t uncommon – but they can lead to you spending ages trying to wipe the sauce up with kitchen roll.

For some reason, ketchup, and other sauces of a similar consistency like mayonnaise, refuse to be wiped up cleanly. Instead, swiping a piece of kitchen roll over the splodge just smears it across the counter, leaving you with an even bigger mess to clean up.

Thankfully though, there is a way you can clean sauce spillages in a matter of seconds – using a hack that actually looks like “magic”.

The trick was shared on TikTok by a woman named Lily, who demonstrated that you can transform a simple piece of kitchen roll into the perfect sauce-cleaning tool by adding just one extra step.

For the hack, Lily purposefully squirted ketchup on her kitchen counter. She then folded a piece of kitchen roll in half and put a metal reusable straw between folded part of the paper.

Placing the kitchen roll at the edge of the sauce stain, she then pulled the kitchen roll around the straw in a similar motion to a conveyor belt. As if like magic, the paper was able to pick up the sauce without a single drop being smeared over the counter.

Although Lily used a metal straw for her hack, you could use any object that creates a firm surface for the kitchen roll to both grip the sauce and be pulled through like a conveyor belt.

Other TikTok videos that have demonstrated this trick before have used items such as wooden chopping boards, in which case you would fold the paper around the edge of the board.

Commenters on Lily’s video were blown away by the “magic” cleaning hack, with many saying they had never thought of trying it out themselves but would be giving it a go the next time they have a ketchup mishap.

One person said: “I need to do this!” While another exclaimed: “This is so cool!”

Athird person also wrote: “I tried this and I can’t believe it worked. Thank you for sharing.”