How to Get Smells Out of Silicone Kitchenware

A year or two ago, someone gave me a set of silicone ice cube trays, so I promptly got rid of the junky old plastic trays I’d been using. For a few months, that seemed like a great decision. Then I started to notice that my glasses of ice water were tasting more like the frost scraped off the back of my cluttered freezer. I had run into the one big flaw that had led us to initially dismiss silicone models entirely from our guide to ice cube trays: smells stick to silicone like flies to flypaper. And though no amount of scrubbing can get those smells off, ice cubes readily absorb them (it’s possible ice picks up smells directly from the freezer too, but in my experience and in our testing, silicone makes the problem much, much worse).

I came this close to getting rid of my trays, but instead, dove into researching cleaning tips and came out the other side with a solution that’s super effective, requires very little effort, and involves no cleaning supplies.

Lingering smells are not a problem limited to silicone ice cube trays; it can happen to all kinds of silicone kitchenware. The silicone gasket inside the lid of an Instant Pot (or any pressure cooker, for that matter), will absorb pungent odors like garlic, and then transmit them to the next thing you cook—a problem if you want to make, say, rice pudding. Silicone spatulas can also get odiferous, as can silicone bakeware.

A handful of solutions come up if you start Googling how to get the stink out of silicone. A lot of them involve soaking or burying your silicone in something (like vinegar, baking soda, or cat litter) and leaving it for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. But I, being impatient and loathe to buy a large quantity of something (like cat litter) that might not do me any good, skimmed past all of these. From what I could find on cooking forums, most of them didn’t seem that effective anyway.

Luckily, my unwillingness to take on an involved cleaning project paid off. After a little more time digging around on the Internet, I came across a Reddit post suggesting you could simply bake the smell out of your silicone ice trays. So I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, tossed in the ice cube trays, and, miraculously, pulled them out about half an hour later completely odorless.

The easiest way to get the stink out of silicone

Since that initial test run, I’ve made some adjustments to the technique as it was posted on Reddit. Here’s what I do:

• Preheat the oven to 250 ºF. I find that a lower temperature works just as well, though it may take a little longer. Most silicone cookware I’ve seen is oven-safe up to 500 ºF or more, and if yours is clearly labeled as such, go ahead and use a higher temperature. But because things like ice cube trays don’t usually come with heat limits, I like to err on the side of caution and treat them a little more gently. So far I haven’t had an issue.
• One very important thing to check before you go any further: Make sure that whatever you’re cleaning is 100 percent silicone or otherwise heatproof. Although silicone can hold up under high temperatures, it’s not a good idea to stick most rubbers or plastics into the oven. Read more on this in “Some important precautions” below.
• While the oven is heating, carefully wash your silicone item with soap and hot water to make sure it’s not covered in any food residue or oils that might get baked onto it in the oven.
• Place your silicone item in the oven, either on a baking sheet or directly on an oven rack. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
• Pull the item out of the oven and carefully take a whiff (you don’t want to burn your nose!). If you detect some lingering scent, return it to the oven. I like to check every 10 minutes or so until the scent is gone, and in my experience the process shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes or so. Leaving your items for longer probably won’t harm them (things like a silicone loaf pan are meant to be left in the oven for an hour or more anyway), but I haven’t tested baking anything for more than an hour, so proceed with caution when baking items like ice trays that aren’t specifically labeled for oven use.

I haven’t tried this technique on a huge variety of scents and objects, but I have used it to successfully remove smells from ice cube trays, Instant Pot gaskets, and the little silicone nub that seals my Zojirushi travel mug. It worked exceptionally well on the ice trays, and at getting the smell of soup out of an Instant Pot gasket. On the Zojirushi seal, I noticed a light lingering coffee scent, but that seemed to be tied to some residual oils I could see clinging to the silicone. After pulling the seal out of the oven, I gave it an extra scrub to remove that residue, and the scent disappeared almost entirely.

I asked Wirecutter senior staff writer and former science editor Leigh Krietsch Boerner why this baking trick works, and although she couldn’t find any studies on the subject, she suspects the answer is relatively simple. Those off smells are made up of molecules clinging to your silicone kitchenware, and just like water, those molecules evaporate at high temperatures. So when you bake silicone, you are truly burning the scents right off. This might explain why the trick didn’t work so well on those coffee oils, which didn’t evaporate in the heat. It also explains why, when I first baked my ice cube trays, I could actually smell the freezer burn wafting out from the oven.

Some important precautions

Before you go throwing a bunch of kitchenware into your oven, there are a few very important things to know:

• Most important, as mentioned above, this trick works only for items that are 100 percent silicone or otherwise extremely heatproof. Please do not put plastic ice cube trays or spatulas with plastic handles into a hot oven. The heat will ruin the tool, and maybe ruin your oven. If you’re at all unsure what an item is made of, check the manufacturer’s website to find out. And note that certain materials, like the rubbery handle on our favorite OXO whisk, look and feel like silicone but aren’t and will melt.
• Silicones in general are stable at high temperatures, and I haven’t noticed any changes to my ice cube trays after baking them several times. But items like ice cube trays haven’t necessarily been heat tested by the manufacturer. If that makes you uncomfortable, you should stick to using this technique only on items like silicone cake pans, which have been heat tested.
• Along the same lines, if you plan to use this technique on the gasket for your Instant Pot, stick to heating it to 250 ºF. Other silicone accessories made by Instant Pot are heat resistant to 450 ºF, but the company doesn’t provide those specifications for its sealing rings so it’s best to err on the side of caution. The Instant Pot itself can reach temperatures as high as 242 degrees, while stovetop pressure cookers with similar gaskets (as well as the forthcoming Instant Pot Max) will get up to 250 degrees, so 250 is likely a safe temperature for the gasket. But because your Instant Pot won’t build pressure properly without an intact gasket, it’s important to treat it with more care than you might an ice cube tray. That being said, the gaskets on all pressure cookers eventually need to be replaced, as they wear out over time. You’ll know it’s time to get a new one when your cooker takes longer than usual to come to pressure.

About those other techniques

One of the most common suggestions for getting smells out of silicone is to soak your silicone item in a 50-50 mixture of white vinegar and water for a while. I’ve seen it in a number of forums, and it’s also what Tovolo, the maker of some popular silicone ice cube trays, recommends. But it’s only moderately effective at best. In researching our guide to ice cube trays, some of my colleagues tried soaking a smelly ice tray in vinegar and water for an hour before rinsing it, and found that the freezer smell was slightly reduced, but definitely still there.

I’ve also seen people recommend coating or soaking your silicone kitchenware in a mixture of baking soda and water for a few hours, burying it in cat litter for a few days, or just running it through the dishwasher regularly. But from my research, none of these seemed easy enough or reliable enough to try. The baking soda thing is messy, and from most feedback I saw online, about as effective as vinegar. The dishwasher might work, or it might not, or it might make your silicone taste like detergent instead. Or you (like me) might not own a dishwasher. Some people have had success with cat litter, but I don’t want to buy a whole bag when I don’t own a cat. Nor do I want to worry if cat litter has any odd additives that I shouldn’t be ingesting.