Posted on April 24, 2020
Need some tips on how to get a sparkling clean oven? Our experts are here to help to offer advice on how to keep your oven clean.
Cleaning an oven is a job we all love to hate. There are no two ways around it - it is a messy, greasy, painstaking job that, just to top it all off, often involves the use of harsh shop-bought chemicals that play havoc with your skin and leave you needing to fumigate your kitchen for hours.
So if you’re fed up like everyone else with sore elbows from scraping away at burnt food that seems to have become part of the oven interior, what are the alternatives? Here are four great hacks for getting your oven spotless with minimum effort, no nasty chemicals, and which might just save you some money, too.
Four steps to keeping your oven clean
1. Wipe down after every use
Yes, that’s right - probably the simplest solution to avoiding epic oven cleaning challenges is to clean your oven as regularly as possible, and preferably after every use. Things get really grim with your oven when food and grease are allowed to build up over time, getting baked over and over into a hard black carbonised nightmare. The best way to avoid that is to make sure there is no food or grease left in your oven every time you use it.
The best way is to let your oven cool until it is warm but you can touch it comfortably, so any food/grease will still be soft. Then simply wipe it down with a wet, soapy cloth. Or if you are unlikely to be able to clean the oven until the next day at least, a great hack is to sprinkle salt on any food spillages. This stops anything sticking, so even when it dries and hardens, it is still easy to wipe away.
2. Steam clean
Another great option for dealing with the dreaded hard oven crust is to place a pan of boiling water in the oven, crank up the temperature and leave it to steam for an hour. Again, if you let the oven part cool until it is safe to touch, you should be able to wipe everything down with relative ease - steam is great at softening burnt-on grime. Some people swear that using a vinegar solution works wonders, too, or squeezing lemon juice into the water.
3. Vinegar and bicarb
Speaking of vinegar, don’t turn your nose up at the original home oven cleaning remedy - good old fashioned vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. The idea is to mix the two ingredients into a thick paste and smear it all over the interior of your oven (but not the heating elements). As you may remember from science at school, vinegar and bicarb react quite impressively when mixed, fizzing and bubbling all over the place, so you’re effectively spreading a homemade chemical reagent all over your oven. Leave it for a couple of hours, and the fizzing reaction should have helped loosen much of that nasty grime.
4. Dishwasher tablet
Pulling your hair out over oven glass that you can no longer see through to check on your best baking? Well try this hack - take one of those cake-type dishwasher tablets (so not one of the gel pouches), dip it in water and wipe down the inside of the glass, crumbling the detergent into a soapy foam as you go. Wipe away with warm water and you should be able to see inside your oven again when the door is closed!
Fast reliable oven repairs
If you are having oven problems that require more than just a good clean, book an accredited engineer to come and take a look using our super-fast fixed fee repair service.