the curious case of the stinky fridge

everything I learned from a deep clean

Hello and happy Friday my dears. If you missed last week’s gift guide in the great Buying Weekend Rush, you can read it here. And in the spirit of gifting, the next five people to purchase a paid subscription—for a friend or as a gift—will receive a cookbook in the mail from me, with a little note and some recommendations. You can give a gift subscription through this link, or upgrade to paid here:

I kept my shopping to a minimum this week, mostly bragging to my friends about the incredible deal I got on my fancy shampoo, though I did pick up some of my favorite teas over at Simpson and Vail, as well as a few new samples. Perhaps the biggest change in my kitchen over the last year has been the development of my loose leaf tea habit, and every time I replenish my staples I try an ounce or two of something new, like a black tea from Tanzania, or a pricey Nepali tea I’d never order at a higher volume. A rotating cast of novelties, a new toy under the proverbial tree every few months.

My cooking, recently, has been less exciting. The last month has been all work and little play, which means I’m just roasting chickens atop vegetables and making smoothies and quesadillas and noodles and ordering sandwiches from the chicken place around the corner. These are my subsistence foods, my fallback meals, and while I am grateful for them I am eager to have a single new thought in the kitchen soon. I’m hoping to have some new recipes for you in the next month, a backlog of things I’ve been meaning to test but haven’t had the time. And I’m eager to spend some time with some new cookbooks, like Yewande Komolafe’s My Everyday Lagos and Bee Wilson’s The Secret of Cooking. An ambitious December, we’ll see how it goes.

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The most important thing I’ve done in the kitchen in the last few weeks, actually, is an excavation of scent in my fridge and freezer. I am almost hesitant to write about this here, because, well, I don’t want to seem gross, but my fridge had acquired a rank scent that was sending me into a tailspin every time I opened the door. Not wafting out from one bad apple or long-forgotten tub of greens, but a rancorous stink that had become endemic to my fridge. After weeks of misery I forced myself to act, and cleared my schedule on a Friday night for a deep clean.

I am not a deep-cleaner. I find pleasure in tidying, not in scrubbing. But I do enjoy a dramatic project, and I do crave inner peace. I did some cursory research, googling remove smells fridge freezer five different times over the span of a month, and found a handful of common advice: clear everything out, wipe down walls and surfaces, use bleach if you must, unplug and thaw if you can, decant your baking soda¹. I made a plan, bought a roll of paper towels, and got to work.

I really had two issues to tackle. The first being the vicious fridge stink, the second being a lurking case of freezer smell. One seems to spur the other: a stinky fridge, I’ve learned, infects the freezer with which it shares air.

The project felt annoyingly metaphorical. The fridge is a private, intimate place. It is where I store my precious goods, the things that hold the hope of my kitchen. And if I open the door and it fucking stinks, it feels like a revelation of some deep and basic shame inside me. If my fridge is gross, so am I.

Anyways in an effort to not be gross I took everything out of my freezer, put the most important stuff in a cooler, and stuffed the rest into the fridge. I put my silicone ice molds in the giveaway pile, because I have learned over our six years that silicone absorbs smell viciously, and even if you bake it for hours a low oven, doesn’t neutralize easily. (I’ve replaced them with the Oxo plastic trays.) I wiped everything down with hot soapy water, and then unscrewed the back panel of the freezer.

I did not know this existed. Did you? The guy in this consumer reports video told me to do it so I did, and then sprayed down what lies behind—the “evaporator coil”—with hot soapy water. Apparently, the evaporator coil can absorb bad smells; mine was also caked in ice, which I imagine has been there since the day I moved in, picking up the scent molecules of six years of chicken broth and bacon and onion skins. I have no idea if spraying it down did anything, but it felt like spelunking, which felt useful. I then aired out the freezer, keeping the door open while I cleaned the fridge. I set a bowl of baking soda in there, sprinkled with a few drops of peppermint essential oil, to flush out any lingering smells². What does freezer smell smell like? It’s nearly impossible to describe. Like long-forgotten plastic, like stubborn nubs of fat, like abandoned ideas, like a completely nontoxic but haunting stain.

Next came the fridge, a slightly less mysterious place. Surely you know how to clean the fridge: you take everything out, you take out the drawers and the shelves, you wash those, you wipe down the walls. So I wiped down the walls with baking soda diluted in water, and used a vinegar-water solution for actual stains, and deep cleaned the shelves and drawers with hot soapy water. I cleaned the black rubber gasket that rings the inside of the door, apparently a lurking spot for bacteria. I threw out a lot of stuff, a freeing act for someone so averse to food waste. My fridge was emptier than it had been in years. I felt, as they say, clean and clear and under control.

my fridge when it’s “nearly empty” lol

There is one task I did not get to. All the articles I read spoke of a mysterious drip pan, which lies below the fridge and collects water. This water, you might already have guessed, can take on a smell. I will ask again: did you guys know about this? I am not a homeowner, I live in ignorance. I tried to pull my fridge out from the wall enough to unscrew the back panel that I assume hides the drip tray but my kitchen is so narrow this has so far been impossible.

Was all this scrubbing and podcast listening (3 hours lmao) worth it? Well, yes, the offending stench went away, and my freezer smell has decreased by at least 50%, and now that I have the new Oxo trays my ice cubes taste NORMAL. A week or so out, I’m pleased with my results, and dogged by the prospect of that drip pan. I tell myself I’ll try to access it next week, in the light of day. I tell myself that it could be the answer to all my olfactory problems, that it could turn me into someone with a pristine kitchen, no hidden yucky parts. I know these people exist, the people whose fridges smell like they’re a day old. I know I am genetically not this person. But the goal remains. Cooking goes hand in hand with mess, a constant volley back and forth between buying and making things and cleaning up after them, assessing their damage. The kitchen is a place of wreckage, and I suppose we must treat it as such—with equal parts respect and resignation.

If anyone has tips, tricks, or good stories about cleaning the fridge PLEASE tell me in the comments. And if you know anything about my drip pan you’re contractually obligated to share!!

1. Apparently just “putting an open box of baking soda in the fridge” is not very successful. The best way to use baking soda as a scent absorber in the fridge is to pour some into a little bowl, or even an empty (and cleaned-out) spice jar, the kind with holes in the top. To be honest, I’ve found that the best thing to do is to place a little bowl of coffee grounds in the fridge for a day or so. I’m still unsure whether the baking soda really does anything, though I’m inclined to trust decades of housewives.

2. Don’t do this for too long lest your cheese taste like mint chip ice cream (long story)