So, I’ve come up with a personal spin on the old, “It’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk” saying.

It’s hot enough to peel the labels off plastic snack containers.

Here’s the context.

It starts with me being a cheapskate who likes to repurpose empty snack food containers as kitchen storage. Big barrels of cheese balls, rectangular canisters for peanut-butter pretzel nuggets, cylinders full of Jelly Bellies & salted caramels — I like them all.

(random side note: the PB pretzel containers are 2x the size of the caramel cylinders but use the exact same lid!)

Anyway. Once emptied of their original snacks, some containers are perfect for containing other snacks — all the ones that come in unseal-able bags or flimsy boxes. Things like, oh, breakfast cereal, other pretzels, crackers, potato chips, veggie straws, pistachios. They’re also excellent for smaller quantity baking supplies.

Basically, they’re just as clear, and durable, and conveniently-sized as fancy Container store canisters, but they don’t cost an arm & a leg. Heck, they free. What’s not to love?

In a word, the labels. I don’t want to put food in things with worn, half-peeled, wrinkly old wrong labels. Ick. But label removal is a tedious, time-consuming chore involving Goo-gone & much swearing. Or olive oil, even MORE time, similar amounts of cursing, and lots of things falling on the floor. In fact, the better the container is, the more of a PITA the label is to remove. It’s almost like the makers don’t want them repurposed.

But I digress.

Herkes House regularly ends up with a new empties, but I tend to procrastinate the de-labeling part, so I always have a bunch lying around waiting for me work up the energy to deal with them.

Now here’s a fun fact about glue: the adhesive used for many food packaging labels softens to the clean-removal point at roughly 110 ºF.

It’s hot here this week. Officially we got to 99ºF today, with a heat index of 114F. At lunch time, I got the bright idea of putting all my empty snack containers outside on the patio for an hour while I ate (indoors, in the cool) And then I went back out and easily peeled off all the labels in less than five minutes.

I’m pleased to have a batch of clean containers, but damn, that is scary hot, for real. Hot enough to melt glue is H O T.

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