While you’re cooking a delicious meal, nothing smells better. Unfortunately, after the meal, those lovely scents can turn foul and linger.

Cleaning up promptly after cooking, turning on the stovetop vent, and opening some windows, prevent smells from sticking around. Below are a few common questions regarding odors in the kitchen and tried-and-true remedies for those situations!

Why Does the Kitchen Hold Smells?

Understanding why your kitchen stinks is essential to eliminate and preventing kitchen smells. Sometimes food, grease, and grime get lodged in your sink drain or garbage disposal. This causes smelly odors to fill your kitchen and sometimes the entire home.

Food spills in and around the stove, oven, cupboards, and corners of the floor. The kitchen is the primary location where families keep garbage cans and recycling bins. Food and other debris can fall outside the cans and bins. It will rot if left uncleaned.

This can also happen with expired food in the refrigerator. Smells permeate from rotten meat, sour milk, or mildewed cheese. Altogether, this can make the kitchen, a gathering place for most families, unpleasant.

What Absorbs Smells in the Kitchen?

The best way to eliminate kitchen smells is to find an effective way to neutralize or absorb them. This goes for even the most stubborn of odors, like bacon, broccoli, or fish. Try these five, easy solutions:

1. Place Baking Soda or Vinegar on the Counter

Pour a cup or two of vinegar or baking soda into a small bowl. Leave the bowl on your kitchen counter overnight (or for at least eight hours). This will neutralize stubborn, stinky smells—and you’ll wake up to a nicer-smelling kitchen in the morning.

2. Brew Some Coffee

A freshly brewed pot of coffee doesn’t just help people who need their morning cup to get started in the morning. The smell of nitrogen-rich coffee grounds absorbs odors. So don’t throw those grounds away!

After brewing your coffee, spread the grounds on a baking sheet to dry for about eight hours. Your kitchen will smell nice and fresh. Afterward, stick them in the refrigerator to do the same thing for odors in there.

3. Boil Vinegar and Water on the Stove

Before you even start cooking, boil half a cup of vinegar with water to prevent smells before they happen. Use a small saucepan; when that combination starts boiling or simmering, it produces steam. Keep the steam going throughout your meal preparation, and it will absorb any and all unpleasant odors.

4. Sprinkle or Store Baking Soda

Baking soda helps to eliminate kitchen smells in a variety of ways. Sprinkle some along the bottom of your trash bag before throwing stinky foods away. You can also sprinkle a bit in your trash can and rinse it out if one of your bags springs a leak.

Open a new baking soda box and place it in the back of your refrigerator. It will absorb odors for up to a year and a half after it was opened!

5. Put Lemons in Your Garbage Disposal

Don’t throw away your lemon rinds or skins after you use them. Instead, stick them down the garbage disposal with other food scraps. This will leave behind a pleasant scent and cut through grease and grime build-up at the same time.

What Is the Most Powerful Odor Eliminator?

Essential oils, home fragrances, and aromatherapy oils eliminate powerful odors and make your kitchen smell great.

Do you live in your own home or in an apartment where neighbors’ smells sometimes drift over through shared vents? Either way, you can find the right diffuser for you. This is equally true for small spaces and larger rooms.

Don’t just cover up stinky odors—eliminate kitchen smells entirely. Aera's diffusers ensure odor elimination by preventing smells in the future. This is better than a one-time fix, as Aera’s scents last for up to two months with programmable diffusers. Other benefits include oils free of harmful VOCs (with no residue left behind).

Aera is the only diffuser with Microdroplet Technology, creating a cleaner, safer, and more immersive scent experience. Enjoy a better-smelling kitchen today!