Don't Throw Out Stale Bread – Use It To Clean Broken Glass In Your Kitchen Instead

While it may be bad etiquette to clear a glass you broke at a restaurant, you probably don't want to leave any lying around in your home. And while it may be simple to just sweep up the chunks and toss them, you can actually use a common kitchen staple to clean up that harmful, microscopic dust you can't manage to get into the bin.

All you have to do is take a piece of bread and dab the area where the glass broke. It's a particularly good tool for the job because leavened bread is naturally porous and soft enough to pick up all the little bits of debris you may not see. While you could accomplish this with a wet rag, the nice thing about bread is that you can just throw it away when you're done, rather than risk cuts or irritation from washing a rag. Even better, this is a great use for bread that is going stale. Once it's too firm to eat, it becomes stiff enough to help protect your hand from any shards poking through.

Bread gets hard when it's stale because of its starch molecules recrystallizing, and while a bit of firmness helps, you won't be able to use this trick with anything hard as a rock. Your bread needs to still have some give to pick up the shards. And while this hack works great on glass, your little glutinous sponge works well for other messes as well.

Leftover bread is surprisingly versatile in the kitchen. From molding it into custom shapes to sopping up oil spills, a staling loaf is just as effective as any rag in your arsenal.

For grime-filled corners or stubborn crevices, old bread is a game-changing cleaning tool. You can essentially compress, shove, or shape it to fit into tight areas, acting as a custom-molded sponge to scrub away dirt. For even more reach, you can pierce a slice on a skewer — a trick that works best with bread that is only slightly, rather than extremely, stale. Plus, once the job is done, you can simply use a vacuum hose to suck out any leftover crumbs.

If you're not interested in staining a rag, use a slice of bread to clean up the worst of the mess. This helps increase the longevity of your other cleaning tools, all at the expense of something you were probably going to throw away anyway. While it won't disinfect the area like a cleaning wipe, it removes enough of the problematic ingredients, like chili oil, brightly colored sauces, or even meat juice, that you can spray and wipe the area with a rag later.