Cooking Baking Eating

I love to bake bread. I know, I know. That’s one of those sayings that most of my friends will look at me with an expression of “Duh!”.

But here’s the thing. I hate cleaning up after making bread. I always end up with little bits of dough that completely clog up my cleaning sponges. It makes a great glue but that really isn’t what I want in my sponge.

This is probably a very familiar sight to anyone who bakes their own bread on a regular basis. The spoon or other mixing utensil is completely covered in raw dough, not to mention your hands and the bowl.

It’s also a bitch to get out from under your nails.

Recently I’ve been able to make the dough removal task quite a bit easier and not quite as gross on my scrubbing sponge. And you probably already have one in your shower, though you’ll probably want to buy a new one for this use.

Do you recognize that? Its one of those shower poof/loofah things. No really, it is. I’ve seen things that have that same type of material wrapped around it for scrubbing, but that’s not really the point is it? If you buy one of those then you have to keep reusing it unless you want to spend another few bucks for a clean one.

And really, that’s not very cost effective for me.

What I did was bought a small one that cost around $1, got some scissors and cut the string holding it together in the middle. There might be a few strings depending on how big of a sponge you get.

You never really realize how much “loofah material” there is until you unravel it. I then roll it all up and keep it in a cupboard next to the sink for easy access.

Now for the easy part. To use: cut, scrub, toss. You don’t need that much of the stuff to un-goo your cooking utensils and make them all shiny again. It really effectively scrubs off all that leftover dough and lets it go mostly down the drain instead of into a sponge you’re keeping.

It might seem like more work to scrub first and then almost re-wash it. However, unless you’ve baked bread or anything gooey on a regular basis it feels like a life saver.

Plus the best part.

Once you’ve gotten all the dough off and your loofah is all gooey you can just throw it away.

Bliss.