You probably don’t look forward to cleaning the dripped mashed potatoes, gravy, and soup from your poor fridge. But there’s a way to make that clean-up a lot simpler, and all you need is cling wrap.
Keep your refrigerator clean with cling wrap
Take everything out of your refrigerator and clean it the way you normally would. (Here are our favorite fridge-cleaning hacks of all time.) Then get out your cling wrap. Ideally, you’ll want the big, restaurant-grade stuff, but the little rolls will work, too. Lay your cling wrap across all the shelving, tucking it around the edges of each rack, then put your food back in the fridge. When it’s time to clean again, repeat the process of pulling your food out, then remove all the cling wrap and replace it. It’s that easy.
Make sure to really tuck the ends down around the edges of your shelving, wrapping them all the way around. If drips get under the cling wrap, they’ll harden and make it all harder to remove, compounding your mess.
You can also use this trick in your freezer, although you might want to only wrap individual items in the cling wrap, like ice cream pails, to avoid it freezing to the shelving.
We learned about this hack from an article titled “Fridge cleaning hack sparks fierce debate,” and while it’s not quite as controversial as the headline would have you believe, there are kitchen mavens out there who think it’s a little gross to let your spills and messes accumulate on wrap instead of cleaning them immediately. Congrats to those people for never being busy or overwhelmed, but if you’re hesitant about it, just rely on it for the holidays and stick to your normal cleaning routine the rest of the year.