Clean Your Brass Pots and Pans with Ketchup

I've never been a big fan of ketchup (I'm very much a mustard kind of girl), but we do always keep it in the house for ketchup-oriented guests. After reading an article about it in Saturday's paper, my husband surprised me with a new thrifty cleaning tip I had never heard of: use ketchup to clean brass pots and pans. I'm not sure why it works (I'm assuming the acids in the ketchup), but I do know that it does.


We first tried a little dab, to see what the results would be. After letting it sit only a few minutes, we were left with this:

You can clearly see the spot in the middle that shines like new. We then added more to finish the job:

Wipe on, let sit, and rinse off, leaving you with the finished product:

 Ta da! Our pans are like new again. Does anyone know of any other cleaning uses for ketchup?