With the holidays fast approaching, you must be preparing for quite a lot of cooking. Based on our experience, even in households where active cooking doesn’t happen often throughout the year, a lot of people decide to put on the apron and start creating in the kitchen over Christmas. The main character in this domestic festive saga happens to be the oven. It gets more than messy. From a traditional roasted turkey to children’s all-time favourite Christmas cookies, the oven goes through a lot, in just a couple of weeks. Needless to say after so much cooking, comes twice as much cleaning and usually, it isn’t effortless. But that’s why we are here, to tell you the best oven cleaning tricks you certainly need. Bet, after reading this article, you’d wish you knew these much earlier to spare yourself a lifetime of oven scrubbing.
1. Removing burnt-on and grease
The hardest part of oven cleaning is usually getting rid of the burnt-on and the grease. Especially, if they’ve been there for a while! The good news is there is a completely natural way to cope with this with minimal effort. You will need baking soda, vinegar and water. First, mix the baking soda and water together until you get a paste-like solution. Then add vinegar and let it react with the soda (it foams). Apply the mixture to all the inside parts of your oven. Make sure you had taken the oven shelves out beforehand. Put a thicker layer of the solution in places where you know there’s a lot of grease or you would expect to scrub the most. Leave it like this overnight. In the morning, when you remove the solution with a soft sponge, you will notice how most of the burnt-on and debris are coming off as well. If there are still some places that need additional scrubbing, use an old toothbrush to do that.
2. Cleaning the oven shelves
While your oven is sitting with the solution of baking soda, vinegar and water, it’s time to take care of the shelves. Soak them in a bigger bucket, your bathtub or simply get a purpose-built rack. The liquid you need to soak the shelves in will consist of dishwashing soap, oven cleaner and a little bit of freshly squeezed lemon. Leave them there for 30-40 minutes and then wash them with warm water under the sink.
3. Removing bad smells
Baked some fish in the oven? The taste must be amazing, but the smell afterwards, especially in your oven, wouldn’t be yummy at all. The solution to this is actually super simple. Fill in half of a heat-resistant bowl with water and squeeze one lemon inside. Then place this in the oven and put it on low temperature for a couple of hours. When you take it out, your oven will smell fresh and if there was any grease left inside it would come off very easily, with a single wipe of hand.
4. Protecting your oven
Now that you know how to clean your oven the smart way, it’s time to learn how to protect it, so you won’t need to clean it as often. Baking paper is your friend. Use it as a liner whenever you are baking or roasting something juicy. Another option would be to always put your food into a deeper pan to avoid any spillage. When you are roasting meat or fish, opt for cooking bags. Not only it makes the meat softer, but also protects your oven from building on grease on the walls and unpleasant smells.
We hope these tips and tricks for oven cleaning were useful to you. Let us know if you’ve tried any of them and how it went. In the meantime, if you need us, we are only a few clicks away!