I have all these containers that are stained red from pasta. The stains are almost impossible to get off too. How can they be prevented and removed too?
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You mean the marinara ON the pasta, right?
Tomato sauce is very acidic and it just so happens the chemical that gives tomatoes their bright red coloration (lycopene) is very hydrophobic. It repels water and seeks to get inside any kind of porous material it touches. It’s not noticeable to the naked eye, but most forms of plastic are porous rather than smooth and the high acidity of the tomato sauce can cause those small imperfections to grow and let even more pigment leech into the plastic.
Because the lycopene is hydrophobic AND non-polar soapy water won’t work at washing it out. It repels the water and soap has nothing to grab onto. The best way to get rid of those stains is by soaking the containers in vinegar or (more aggressive but more effective) small amounts of diluted bleach. Rather than washing away the difficult stains, they break the chemical down into something that can’t stick around.
Its the tomatoes. They’re very acidic and can damage your plastic containers over time A good scrub with a little Dawn Platinum will usually taken any red stains out of Tupperware as long as you haven’t ever microwaved the sauce while in the plastic container. Once you nuke a tomato sauce in a plastic container though, the red stains it leaves won’t ever come out.
Put a small amount of Dawn dish soap on a wet paper towel, drop it in the container, put on the lid, and shake it for about a minute. The stains will disappear.
My workaround is simply to make a point of having one or two designated containers for red pasta sauces.
I’m not sure if it has so much to do with acidity as it does the fats in the sauce, the type of plastic, age of the container, and microwaving foods in those containers.
I think the fats act like a solution for the lycopene in tomatoes, kind of like vinegar or alcohol in water. Then, I imagine there’s a penetrative action where the plastic is damaged with small knicks and dents, and when microwaves are acting on the oils and maybe allowing some to “transpire” into the plastic.
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