By Published Apr. 15, 2020.
If you’ve owned a squeeze bottle, chances are good that at some point you’ve squeezed it and accidentally popped the top off, spilling the contents of the bottle all over your counter. You can avoid these blowouts by ensuring that the top is screwed tightly onto the mouth of the bottle every time you use it.
Squeeze bottle tips have fairly small openings that allow for a thinner, more controlled pour. This small opening can easily get blocked if you use your bottles to hold and dispense chunkier foods such as salsa and jam or salad dressings with minced ingredients. The solution? Use kitchen shears or a knife to cut the tip down so that the opening is wider.
Squeeze bottles are best for storing condiments that you go through quickly. We don’t recommend storing fancy olive oil—oil that you might use more sparingly—in them, as light and air will penetrate the bottle more easily and degrade the quality of the oil, ruining the flavor. (Instead, store your best olive oil in a dark bottle so that light can’t penetrate it.)
Over time, bottles that are used to store oil can develop an unpleasantly sticky layer of fat. Running the bottles through the dishwasher—or scrubbing with hot water and soap—isn’t always enough to remove this sticky layer. Instead, we recommend making a paste of baking soda and water and using a paper towel to rub the paste over the sticky surfaces, scrubbing the grease away.
