Daily Life Chemistry Hacks- 1

Hello ! everybody; this is our first post and there are some daily life chemistry hacks for you all. 

1. How to Save A Cookies:- You ate way too many, way too fast, passed out on the couch and left the cookies out. Now they’re rock hard, unappetizing, and spoiled your plans to spoil your diet. No problem! Here’s a little trick that’s been passed down for generations. If you put your cookies in a tin or large Ziploc bag with a piece of bread, and they will be as soft as they were when they came out of the oven. Cookies contain far more sugar than bread. Sugars are known to be hygroscopic – that is, they soak up moisture from the surrounding environment. This, along side the dense nature of cookies, allows them to absorb moisture coming from that piece of bread, keeping them nice and soft for a much longer period of time. 

2. Coffee and Salt:- You’re buying the best roast in town, but no matter what you do, your coffee always ends up bitter. Well, chances are you’re brewing with water that’s too hot. The hotter the water, the deeper the extraction from your beans, and the more bitter compounds end up in your brew. So we’ve got an excellent trick for you so you don’t have to worry about becoming a barista to get it right. A tiny little pinch of salt can save you from the bitterness. So if your coffee is bitter, just try it out and taste a world of difference. When salt dissolves, sodium ions break off into the coffee and block bitter molecules from reaching your tongue, greatly enhancing the flavor. Don’t have salt available at your neighborhood coffee shop? Just keep a couple of these in your purse or wallet and you’ll do just fine.

3.  Iron-rust and Coke:- So you didn’t feel like doing dishes after breakfast and threw your cast iron skillet into the sink. When you get home, the thing is covered in rust and you can’t bare to scrub it with a scouring pad for a half hour. Good news for you : open your fridge and grab that two liter of coke. Coke has an ingredient called orthophosphoric acid that's wont to add a sour punch to the super sweet beverage. Funny thing is that this chemical is also used industrially as a rust and tarnish remover! The Phosphoric acid present in the coke converts typical hard to clean, iron oxide rust into blackish ferric phosphate that can easily be scrubbed right off. Go ahead, try it for yourself. 

4. Brown Bagging Bananas:- You’re starving for some bananas but all they had at the store was a bunch of bright green ones. Bananas can take a day or two to ripen, but here is a quick tip to get them up to standard really, really quick. Put your bananas in a paper bag and throw a couple ripe tomatoes in there. The bananas, depending on how green they were to start, will ripen twice as fast. This is because of a plant hormone called ethylene that is used to make fruits ripen faster. When you place ripe tomatoes in the bag with the bananas, the bag traps in the ethylene gas that is produced by the already ripen tomatoes, which in turn forces the bananas to ripen much faster. Also, the riper the bananas get, the more ethylene they produce. 

We hope you liked this first post of Daily life Chemistry  Hacks and there’s gonna’ be plenty more to come. And if you have any tips of your own feel free to comment them our way and we’ll put them into upcoming posts.