Kitchen & Food

#15 · Burst a ketchup bottle blockage

Poke through a clogged ketchup or sauce nozzle and rescue the meal. This small act is genuinely heroic.

There is a particular frustration reserved for a ketchup bottle that will not pour, and a well-known escalation: shake, slap, squeeze, wear. A chopstick short-circuits the whole sequence by removing the plug of dried sauce sitting just inside the neck.

How to do it

1. Take the cap off and look. The plug is almost always visible in the first centimetre.
2. Slide a clean chopstick down and break it up with a gentle twist.
3. Squeeze very lightly to test. Very lightly.
4. Rinse the chopstick and recap.

Why it works

Ketchup is a shear-thinning fluid: it behaves like a solid at rest and flows once force is applied. A dried plug at the neck raises the force needed to start it moving, so you squeeze harder, and when the plug finally gives way the sauce is already moving fast. That is the entire mechanism behind the sudden catastrophic splat.

Tips & warnings

• Store squeezy bottles upside down and the plug never forms.
• Same trick works on mustard, mayonnaise and barbecue sauce.
• After clearing it, the first squeeze should be gentler than feels necessary.