How to open stuck jars … kitchen helper
Why is it that some jars are so hard to open? If you’re tired of wrestling with stubborn jars, we’ve got a few tricks to try to make opening them easier.
1. Rubber gloves – increasing your grip can help with jars that are tough to open. A rubber washing up glove can often give you enough extra grip to open the jar.
2. Rubber bands – another grip improver, rubber bands are an old favourite jar-opening solution. Simply place a thick rubber band around the lid and twist.
3. Heat – following the principle that heat makes things expand, you can try running the lid under hot water for a minute or so to expand the lid, thereby making it less tight. Make sure you don’t use your bare hand to open the lid if it has been heated though.
4. Banging the lid – if you tap the sides of the lid with a wooden spoon you can break the seal and make the jar easier to open.
5. Break the seal – this is our favourite method because it is the most consistently successful. Insert a butter knife under the edge of the lid and move it slowly around to break the seal and open the jar.
6. If all else fails – sometimes no matter what you do, nothing works. If that happens to you, there is one final method that you can try but it comes with a couple of warnings. Firstly, this method is going to put a hole in the lid thereby rendering the lid useless, so if you don’t use the entire contents of the jar in one go you’ll need to decant them into another container. Second, as this method involves sharp implements you need to be very careful to ensure you don’t injure yourself. You will need a bottle opener for this technique. Take the spiral corkscrew part of the bottle opener which has a sharp pointed end and use it to pierce the top of the lid. This will immediately pop the seal and make it easy to remove the lid.
