That fabric softener sheet you tossed in the trash after you dried your laundry may have one more job left in it. Home cooks across the US have embraced a new trick. Instead of throwing a used dryer sheet into the garbage, toss it in your dirtiest pots and pans, let it sit in warm water overnight, then rinse away the grease.
A 2015 study, ‘Molecular mechanisms for surfactant-aided oil removal from a solid surface,’ in Applied Surface Science found that the conditioning agents that coat dryer sheets are part of a class of surfactants that have long been studied for their ability to pull oil away from solid surfaces on a molecular scale. The trick sounds almost too easy, but the science behind it holds up.
