Have you ever gone to pour a bit of cooking oil into some pasta, a salad, or even a pan, only to let way too much out of the bottle? Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've all been there at least a few times. Trying not to spill the entire bottle can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
Or maybe it isn't so impossible. TikTok has proven useful once again by showing us a new way to pour oil.
You know how you screw off the top of a brand new bottle of cooking oil and it has that plastic tab on it? The tab is meant to keep everything sealed so that you know it hasn't been tampered with.
Usually we rip it off and throw it away, but as it turns out, you don't have to do that.
Flip it upside down. Then, stick it inside the spout of the bottle. Don't worry, the tab won't fall through or anything; there should be a section on the spout the tab can rest on top of.
The tab should fit securely, meaning it won't fall out when you go to pour oil out of the bottle. But as you can see, it greatly reduces the amount of space the oil has to pour out of.
It's time to pour to your heart's content. Because the tab is nice and snug and in place, it's going to prevent too much oil from pouring out at once.
If you just need a little bit of oil, it'll be so much easier to pour. (And if you need a lot, it may take you longer, but no one needs that much oil most of the time).
I can't believe I'm only finding out about this now! This would've been so helpful sooner. I wouldn't be able to count how many times I've accidentally poured too much oil when I only needed a little. Striking that balance is way too tricky.
The video was posted to TikTok by user @chaldomom back in March. As of now, it has over a million likes and more than seven thousand comments. A lot of people are astonished by this hack. At least I feel a little less alone about having no idea about this sooner.
If there's one thing people tend to be weirdly passionate about, it's how to cook pasta. I was always taught to put a bit of olive oil in your pasta to keep the noodles from sticking to each other.
But some say that's the wrong way to do it. "You shouldn't do that if you actually want the sauce to stick to the noodles better," one comment reads.
Yes, despite this hack being incredibly straightforward on paper, there were some people who managed to press the tab in too far, kind of defeating the purpose.
"I did it and the thingy ended up going inside the olive oil," wrote one person — with another adding, "It's all fun and games till it falls back into the oil."
One of the most popular alternatives came from someone who wrote, "You put the oil on the spoon"!
I have known a lot of people to use the spoon method, but who has the time to get a spoon out, right?!
At the end of the day, this will probably help a lot of us out. But what do you think? Is it a lifehack worth remembering, or will it cause more problems than it'll solve? And is there really one correct way to cook pasta?
