The Cooking Oil You Need To Easily Remove Stubborn Food Stickers

There are so many reasons to save the glass jars your grocery items come in. You can use jam jars to make overnight oats, or mason jars to make all cooking easier and often more visually impressive, too — think layered parfaits and salads. You can drink your morning cold brew out of them, and, in general, they're one of the key ways to build a low-waste pantry so you're not always going through single-use packaging. And it doesn't hurt that a kitchen lined with glass jars in various sizes is a very aesthetically pleasing look. There's just one catch: Getting those stubborn labels off of the jars. You don't want to sip your iced tea out of a jar with a big brand sticker on it, and different labels make storage a real headache — is the dried mint in the Ragu jar or the Stonewall Kitchen jar? We're always looking for a trick to remove stickers from glassware, and we've found it in coconut oil.

Coconut oil is effective because it has a high saturated fat content. That gets into the label's paper and sticky adhesive and loosens it, making it a snap to wipe away. If you do find a sticker has been loosened but isn't disappearing with a swipe, mix in a little baking soda with the oil. The baking soda provides some abrasive grit, so while the coconut oil frees everything up, the baking soda helps scrub it away. 

To put coconut oil to work removing labels, dip a cotton ball into it and then firmly but gently dot it over the label to saturate it. The oil then has to sit for a little while to work its adhesive-greasing and separating magic, so leave the jar aside for about 15 minutes. After that, the label should peel off, and if it doesn't in one or two easy scrapes, add in that baking soda. Make sure you wash the jar well after that, to get all of that oil off. 

This of course works with all pesky stickers, so coconut oil will come in quite handy in your home beyond its actual cooking purposes. You can quickly and easily get price stickers off of plates, glasses, tools, and more. Beyond stickers and labels, coconut oil's fat can lift other unwanted things, like marks on your walls and linoleum floors and anything that might have gotten stuck in your carpet. In fact, coconut oil can even loosen a jammed zipper — it's a true jack of all trades for un-sticking things. Plus, it's good for conditioning wood, polishing stainless steel, and you can use it to season a cast iron pan. Is there anything coconut oil can't do? We're betting on no, and stocking up on extra jars — which we can then remove the labels from and repurpose.