Taco Sauce Penny Cleaner

Courtesy of Steve Spangler my daughters and I set out to clean a couple of pennies using nothing more than taco sauce!  We did this a month or so ago using a vinegar mixture.  You can read the blog post for the details.  The basic idea here is to take a couple of dirty pennies, dump taco sauce on them, wait a couple of minutes, and then rinse the pennies off.

Dirty Pennies

Taco Sauce Covered Pennies

Clean Pennies

The pictures don't do this experiment justice, but you should be able tell that the pennies are cleaner after having been soaked in taco sauce.  We used Taco Bell mild sauce, but most taco sauces should work.  So what is going on here?  Should we really be eating taco sauce that can clean a penny?  Actually, yes, you can.  The key is the ingredients in taco sauce, particularly vinegar and salt.  A mixture of vinegar and salt will clean pennies, and taco sauce just happens to have both ingredients in it.  The other ingredients such as tomatoes do not factor in to the cleaning process.

Now you have something you can do that will use up those random packets of Taco Bell taco sauce that end up in your fridge!  It's also a great activity for kids.  Both of my daughters loved moving the pennies around in the taco sauce!