Hasta La Ideas

I cook with a lot of olive oil. The stuff is so expensive I’m convinced it’s imported by the mob. To save money, I’ve started buying it in those big 3-liter tins that you see sitting on shelves in Italian restaurants when the kitchen door swings open.

The pouring spout on the tin sucks and you can’t use it when you cook. It “glugs” out of the spout uncontrollably, then drips all over the sides of the tin which become too slippery to hold. My cooking is already bad enough that I don’t need poor ergonomics working against me too.

So I took an old, regular bottle of olive oil that I saved, and periodically stick a funnel in it to refill it from the tin. 

I bought one of those OXO pouring spouts and this solution is ergonomically acceptable. It’s much easier to cook while using the bottle.

Today I was refilling the bottle and the tin seemed to drain completely. However, I could still hear liquid sloshing around in there. But no matter how much I shook it, no more oil would come out. So I cut the lid off with a can opener to see what was going on in there: 

And I saw there was still a good amount of oil left inside:

I know you can’t tell how much that is from the photo, so I poured it into a measuring glass. There was about five ounces in there…

…which is like 150 mL for everyone who doesn’t live in Trumpland.

That’s too much to throw away, so I’m glad I cut the tin open. Here’s the culprit:

The design of this plastic insert pour spout thoroughly sucks. In addition to providing lousy flow, it protrudes about 3/4 of an inch (fine, 19 millimeters, get off my ass) into the tin. 

While there are some drain holes that allow some of the olive oil to drip back down into the inside of the tin…

…they are located such that when the tin is inverted, it is impossible for that last 150 mL of product to evacuate.

As always with bad industrial design, the problem is one of multiplication. Multiply 150 mL by all of the tins in every Italian restaurant and household in New York City alone, and you probably have thousands of liters of perfectly good olive oil going to waste each month. Millions of liters each year.

I can’t do anything about that except cut my own tins open. I’m also going to rinse and scrub this one out, and try to think of something I can use them for as they accumulate.