If you are a passionate cook and love preparing delicious meals in your home, chances are your oven is one of the most used appliances in the kitchen. If there is a thick layer of grime, charred food and built-up grease inside, you definitely need to consider oven cleaning. If you do not clean your oven regularly, the accumulated spoils inside will turn into carbon as you cook. This will cause strong burning smell. If you ignore the issue for too long, the carbon will eventually spoil the food you cook there and may even become a fire hazard.
Obviously, cleaning is not an issue for owners of self-cleaning appliances. If you have one such, you only need to invest very little time and effort to guarantee your oven is always ready for cooking.
As far as oven cleaning is concerned for those not lucky enough to own self-cleaning ovens, you should know that not all cleaning service associated with this task needs to include heavy-duty chemical cleaners. There is certainly no need to use those, as they can be quite dangerous for your health. You also don’t have to use the auto-cleaning function, even if you have such, because it can often times be very ineffective and a waste of time. All you have to do is finish the steps in the following guide for a perfectly clean and sanitised oven. Simply prepare your baking soda, vinegar and get ready for some elbow grease.
- Remove everything from inside the oven – you cannot perform effective oven cleaning without first removing the racks, thermometer, pizza stone and practically anything else you have in there. See to it that each of these items receives adequate cleaning service too – after all, you cannot just put them in a dirty state.
- Take out your baking soda and make a paste – pour few tablespoons of water in a small bowl and add 1/2 cup of soda. The goal is to have a paste that can be easily spread over the surface of the oven. You can add more water if it is needed till the paste comes to desired consistency.
- Determine the water to soda ratio – the best way to ensure that you are effective in your efforts is to determine the level of spoils in your oven. If you have been neglecting this task for a while, chances are that the caked on carbon will be significantly tougher to remove and will require more soda in the mix. The ultimate rule of thumb is that the more paste-like the mix is the more cleaning power it has. A liquid mix works well for routine oven cleaning, while more soda will create a more potent paste for battling severe spoils.
- Coat the interior of the oven with the paste – when you are done mixing your baking soda paste, it is time to get to the real deal of oven cleaning – tackling the spoils inside. Spread the baking soda paste all over the oven interior, with the exception of the heaters. You can use a scraper, but for perfect coverage of all nooks and crannies you can wear some cleaning gloves and then spread the paste with your fingers. Pay special attention to areas of the oven that are particularly greasy – apply more paste there.
- Leave the soda inside overnight – it is important to let the paste sit in the oven for a while, at least twelve hours or so. That way it will dissolve the spoils so that you can proceed with oven cleaning then.
- Wipe the paste off the interior – when the time has passed, you should get down to wiping. Use a damp cloth and remove as much of the baking soda as you possibly can. Get a spatula to scrape off particularly stubborn areas of the interior that are hard to reach.
- Use some vinegar – vinegar is among the champions of natural all-purpose cleaners of the cleaning world. Focus on the areas of your oven that are still covered in baking soda paste after wiping. This is where the grime is tougher to remove and so you will need a little help in the form of your vinegar bottle. You will notice a foamy reaction when the liquid comes into contact with the soda.
- Wipe again – there is no need to wait further – simply wipe out any paste that remains inside the oven. The vinegar will provide enough moisture to help this second wipe, but if you still meet any difficulties, you can add more vinegar inside or water on your cloth. That ought to make your oven perfectly clean and sparkling. One final touch remains.
- Clean the oven racks – if there is one part of the interior that you should focus most effort on, it is the oven racks. Usually they suffer the most when you spill out something, in which case they come in direct contact with the food. For this reason it is wise to give them a good scrub every now and then, which ensures they are clean and that you have no trouble with your oven.
- Put back inside everything you previously took out – in case you haven’t cleaned the items already, do so now. Fit them where they belong and enjoy the refreshed look of your thoroughly cleaned oven.
- Try to be preventive – if you are not a big fan of cleaning, you will do well to apply some preventive measures when cooking in order to spare your oven. One good way to do this is to put a baking sheet under the rack you are cooking a dish on. It is also wise to tackle any spills as soon as they appear, or else they will set in and just become more difficult to handle.
If you fear oven cleaning, you should definitely give this guide a try. You will see that it is truly easy and effective to clean the oven using this method with soda.
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