I opened my coin bank and gathered all of the similarly tarnished pennies I could find and grabbed the taco sauce! It has been said that you can clean tarnished pennies with taco sauce. Lets test that, shall we?
Taking two pennies I poured a bit of sauce on them and rubbed them a bit with my fingers.
After sitting in the taco sauce for two minutes, I rubbed them a little bit more, rinsed the taco sauce off, and look at them now!
The top penny on the right picture is a penny untouched by the taco sauce so you really can see that there is a HUGE difference. So we know that taco sauce does clean tarnished pennies. But why? Here comes the fun part… we find out!
The main components that make taco sauce are vinegar, tomato paste, salt, and water. Now I put two pennies in each of the substances. Then I did the same process with the taco sauce.
Rubbed the pennies in the substance, waited for two minutes, and rubbed them again. These were the interesting results.
Compared to the taco sauce pennies, the rest of the pennies look almost nothing like them. They did a terrible job cleaning! The tomato paste did an okay job but nothing like the power of the taco sauce!!! So what is the active ingredient for getting the pennies super clean? The only explanation is that two or more of the ingredients are working TOGETHER to make a super cleaning agent! But which two? Ha-ha! Let’s get to work! I mixed together tomato paste+vinegar, salt+vinegar, and Tomato paste+salt and put two pennies in the mixtures and repeated the cleaning process and let the chemistry do its magic!
As you may have already noticed, the salt and vinegar is already really clean. You will not believe this but as soon as i put the pennies in the solution it immediately started to take off the tarnish!! Here are the results of the solution stage.
Both the salt+vinegar and tomato paste+ salt did very well. So there we have it! These are the active cleaning ingredients in the taco sauce that cleans our very dirty pennies. Another mystery solved! Here are the complete results! Obviously the active ingredients alone work better than in the mixture of the taco sauce which makes perfect sense! Because the ingredients alone are at a higher concentration. HA HA!!! This is SO much fun!
