The Surprising Reason You Should Keep Dental Floss In The Kitchen

Your face serum smells good enough to eat. The folks at MyRecipes use makeup-removing Q-tips to clean their waffle iron. Now there's another product blurring the lines between tools for the bathroom and those for the kitchen: Dental floss. While you may groan when it's time for your daily oral hygiene regimen, you might find that using floss to slice, truss, and tie up your favorite foods is another, far more satisfying story.

Floss, which as Dr. Rick Dentistry explains is just thread made of nylon, Teflon, or biodegradable silk, belongs in the kitchen because it can slice foods without crushing them. Whether you use it for precision-grade baking projects or holiday hard-boiled eggs, floss is the kid-safe alternative to knives that you never knew you needed, says Allrecipes. Here's everything you can do with a kitchen-appointed spool of dental floss. (Just make sure you use the unwaxed and unflavored kind, unless you want your brie to have a bubblegum finish.)

If you're a baker, dental floss will be a game-changer for your pastry projects. You can use it to evenly split cake into layers; just wrap a thread of floss around the center of the cake, cross the ends, and pull. You'll have two smooth-surfaced sections — without having to maneuver a knife sideways through your precious dessert (via Allrecipes). When your cake is layered and frosted, you can use floss again to slice it into equal pieces without blurring any detailed decorations. Just hold a long thread over the cake and pull down in one swift motion. The same trick works for dividing log-shaped sweets, like slice-and-bake cookies and cinnamon rolls.

Ina Garten is known to use dental floss for savory applications, such as slicing (rather than squishing) mozzarella for eggplant Parmesan (via The Kitchn) and splitting crumbly goat cheese into level disks for snack time (via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Floss can even halve jammy eggs without making a mess, says Allrecipes. Finally, think of dental floss as a substitute for butcher's twine in a pinch: It probably won't hold up in high-heat situations, but it can be used to tie bundles of herbs to freeze or hang peppers to dry. Now, you have more reasons than ever to make sure you're always stocked up on dental floss.