Roast chicken smells great on a Sunday, but by Monday morning the lingering odour may well have outstayed its welcome. Follow our oven-cleaning tips and your kitchen will come out smelling like roses.
Prevent Fatty Spillage
Taking a couple of minutes to prevent mess in the first place is an excellent way to cut down on your cleaning hours. One main source of smell is probably going to be fat that has either spilled over the edge of the baking tray, or has come from spitting meats and oils. Worse still, this mess can be hard baked onto your oven’s interior, making it a nightmare to tackle. Keeping the heat a little lower and being careful to avoid spills can reduce spitting and keep fats and smells inside the baking tray. Placing aluminum foil on the tray directly beneath whatever you are cooking will certainly catch some of the grease, but probably not all of it.
Remove Charred Food Remains and Residues
It should go without saying that you need to wait for your oven to cool completely before cleaning it. Remember that the interior can stay burning hot for long time after use.
Removing blackened crispy food chunks that have fallen off the baking tray is a good first step for cleaning your oven. You can do this by hand, though you might want to invest in a pair of rubber gloves. Hardened food residues are another prime cause of a stinky oven, but removal can be a little trickier without a suitable cleaning product…
How to Clean your Oven without getting Sodium Hydroxide in your Food…
All of us know how difficult it is to remove food residue from an oven. Unfortunately, the bottles of chemical cleaner that you’ll find in your local supermarket usually have the words ‘fatal if swallowed’ on the side of the container. Not exactly something you want anywhere near your food, right? Luckily, there are professional
oven-cleaning services at hand who know which products are toxic and which ones aren’t. Here’s our list of natural non-toxic oven cleaning products that you can make at home.
- Bicarbonate of soda paste. This is an excellent way to cut through stuck on fatty bits and remove unpleasant odours. Be sure to use a generous application of paste on even the hard to reach places, including behind the heat source.
- A baking soda, water and salt mixture. Combine these ingredients equally to form a miracle non-toxic cleaning paste. Apply the mixture liberally to your toughest stains, crank your oven up to eleven, and let it bake for an hour. You’ll be amazed at the results.
- Coarse salt and lemon juice mixture. This is another excellent non-toxic cleaning product. The salt is a mild abrasive which tackles stuck-on grease, and the citric acid cuts through the fat. Dunk a sponge in the mixture, and give your oven a good long scrub with the rough end, provided you know that your oven’s interior can handle abrasives!
- Lemon juice and water, or white wine vinegar, baking soda and water. Both of these mixes work really well if you use them with a spray bottle. Coat the inside of an oven with this mixture and allow it to soak for four to five hours to neutralise those bad smells.
- When you’ve finished cleaning an oven, always remove the cleaning product afterwards with clean warm water and a clean cloth.
Orange is the new… Non-Toxic Cleaning Product
Guests coming over and there’s no time left to clean?
Orange peel can mask even the strongest smells. Peel an orange, take some large peelings and place them in the oven on a baking tray. After ten minutes of baking, yesterday’s fish dinner will be a distant memory, as your room takes on a sweet orange scent.
Steam Machine
A steam cleaner can work wonders on stuck-on grease and oven mess. You can buy a reasonable steam cleaner for around £100, or if that sounds like too much money and too much work, you can always hire a professional oven cleaner with specialist cleaning equipment instead.
Check the Handbook
Every oven has its own personal quirks, so your oven’s handbook is required reading if you want to make sure that you don’t accidentally do something to damage your warranty. *Ovens can be badly damaged by acids and abrasives, so reading before cleaning is mandatory. If you’re not careful, you could end up making an error way more costly than the price of a professional oven clean.
Sounds like hard work doesn’t it? Alternatively, you could save yourself the time and the hassle by enlisting the help of professionally trained, environmentally friendly oven cleaners.
