Clean pennies with hot sauce

by Nick Vagnoni, Posted Dec 16th 2005 @ 5:05PM

Inspired by one inquiring mind's quest to learn why and how Taco Bell hot sauce cleans pennies, Nick Lindauer at the Hot Sauce Blog decided to do some experimenting of his own. The taco sauce experiments eventually come to the conclusion that it's the salt and vinegar that do the cleaning (sorry if this is old news to you kitchen scientists out there). Those experiments also used Tabasco to good effect. What Nick wants to know is which types of hot sauce work best. He experimented with Original Tabasco, Tabasco Chipotle, Dave's Cool Cayenne, and Blair's Jersey Death. The results? Tabasco Chipotle actually cleans pennies better than the Original Tabasco, probably due to it having more vinegar. Useful? Um, sure.

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Filed Under: Science, On the Blogs, Ingredients
Tags: condiments

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

12-16-2005 @7:51PM cybele said... Yeah, if you want to clean your pennies, stick to white, distilled vinegar. A quick price comparison between vinegar and Tabasco made the choice simple:

Generic Distilled White Vinegar - 4 cents per ounce
Tabasco Sauce (12 ounce) - 59 cents per ounce

Of course if you have oodles of hot sauce packets around, it might make sense. But if you really want to score something for your coin collection, I bet getting those vinegar packets from the Fish 'n Chips places would be even better.

In a slightly related matter, I've noticed that melting dark chocolate in my copper double boiler always makes it very coppery bright, so I'm guessing the acidity of the dark chocolate has something to do with it.

But there's no way I'm going around using chocolate to clean my change!
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