While it may be easier to simply close the door on the oven and turn a blind eye to whatever might be lurking inside, we know really that all we’re doing is delaying the inevitable, and leftover food stains and debris could even end up making us sick.
The best piece of advice you will ever hear with respect to keeping a clean oven, is to wipe up food stains as soon as they occur – of course waiting until the oven is cooled. If you have never received or heeded this advice though, and have reached crisis point with your grubby cooker, here are five quick and easy tips to help clean it up:
- Turn on the oven, allow to cool and then clean up spillages
If the interior of your oven has become encrusted with spilled food items, and you weren’t motivated enough (or didn’t have the time) to clean it up that day, then simply turn your oven on high for around twenty minutes, wait for it to cool enough to be able to touch it inside, and simply clean off the stains with a damp, soapy sponge. With the walls of the oven still being warm to the touch, the dirt and grime will wipe off far easier. You may need to use a little old fashioned elbow grease for the more stubborn stains.
- Add salt to recent stains and spillages
While not everybody has heard of this tip, salt can be an excellent store cupboard item for helping to remove grease, grime and food spillages in your oven. Simply pour a little salt onto the stains, and wait for around ten minutes before wiping them with a soapy sponge or cloth. This may not work so effectively for stains that occurred many days ago, but it should work well for recent stains.
- Get zesty with lemons
Lemon juice is a powerful and natural cleaning solution, that could be used on many surfaces and items in your kitchen and indeed, throughout your home. Helping to cut through grease and grime, cleaning with lemon juice also makes items and surfaces smell fresh and clean. Take a sponge and soak it well in plenty of lemon juice then simply rub it hard all over the interior of your oven. Adding some hot water as you rub will help speed things up and make the grime come off more easily. When you’ve finished, wipe the oven down and since no harsh chemicals were used, your oven can be put into action straight away.
- Good old baking soda
Baking soda is also a classic store cupboard ingredient that can be used effectively to clean many items and surfaces in our homes. Cheap and readily available, baking soda is best used in paste form mixed with water, and when smeared onto food stains and left overnight, the grease and grime should be easy to wipe off with a damp cloth the next day. This solution is especially effective on oven racks, where food spillages often settle and quickly become encrusted.
- Use newspaper in place of a sponge or cloth
As is often the case when cleaning windows, crumpled newspaper can be equally as – if not more – effective than a cloth or sponge. Unlike when cleaning windows though, the newspaper will need to be a little damp to work at its best. Making it too moist will see it simply tear and be ineffective, but with a little added water it can be used to scrub off stains in a grubby oven.