Apparently, We’ve Been Filling Our Ice Trays Wrong

Whether crafting refreshing cocktails or just filling up a cooler full of cold ones, you’ll need some frozen water on hand. 

Patience is a necessary virtue when it comes to filling it the empty tray with water and carefully tucking it back into the fridge. 

Once again TikTok comes to the rescue and show us a better way. According to a post on the social network that doubles as an eternal fount of kitchen wisdom, it turns out that you’ve probably been filling up your ice cube tray incorrectly for your entire life.

“Am I just dumb or did nobody else know this either?” asks @4jmjcbitxh asks in her now-viral TikTok. I can assure her that she is not dumb. In fact, she’s probably smarter than most of us.

Turns out that we shouldn’t be dumping water into each individual ice cube slot that so rudely splash back at us, but into the spaces between them. By aiming your sink at the point where four corners of ice cube reservoirs intersect, the tray acts at a channel to direct the water to where it needs to go.

Your mileage with this technique will vary, of course. Not every ice cube tray was designed with this approach in mind, though the rectangular two row tray is perhaps the closest thing to the platonic form of an ice cube tray. It’s also not clear if this approach saves you all that much time, since it’s not like the water flows any faster. Still, it’s a more elegant—maybe even oddly soothing—alternative to what you’ve probably been doing.