How To Easily Clean Your Oven

The trick to a clean oven can be very simple. I bake a lot and have cheese melting from my lasagnas, sugary pie filling spilling over and all sorts of other messes. Here I will share with you the easiest way to clean your oven.

How To Clean Your Oven With Heat

Here’s the trick. Turn your oven on the hottest it will get for 1 hour. Most ovens will go up to 550. Some ovens, including mine will go higher on the self cleaning function. I don’t know exactly how high mine goes but some sources say the self cleaning functions can go up to 900 degrees!

The idea is to burn everything that has spilled till they turn to charcoal and our easily wiped or swept out of the oven. Depending on how high your oven goes it may or may not burn everything and some scrubbing may have to take place.

Smoke or Fire?

While you are heating and burning the mess in your oven you will have a little smoke and odor coming from your oven. This is normal. You can open the window and turn on a fan to avoid setting off the smoke alarm. Try not to open the oven door while it is cleaning.

If there is a concerning amount of smoke then first turn the oven off and then open cautiously. If you have a fire extinguisher or a emergency fire blanket and you suspect a fire, get those ready before you open the oven.

Cleaning With Baking Soda

I like to clean with baking soda and vinegar, hot water. Cleaning with natural products is important to me. To be honest the easiest way to clean an oven is to buy the foamy chemical spray but I just can’t get myself to spend money on chemicals that I don’t want in my house simply for connivance.

To make cleaning your oven easy, without compromising my principles, I heat my oven on the highest degree for an hour, let it cool, then scrub any needed areas with baking soda. After a good scrub I spray it down with my lemon vinegar cleaner and wipe down with a rag.

Benefits of Cleaning with Baking Soda

Baking Soda is a natural chemical called sodium bicarbonate. It is a white powder or soft crystal that gently scratches off grime and dirt without scratching the surface of what ever you are cleaning. Baking soda is alkaline and reacts to acidic greases and grime braking them up and making it easier to clean.

Wipe Your Oven Down

Once you have scrubbed down the oven simply wipe everything down with a wet rag. Sometimes it take a while to get all the baking soda off. Use some vinegar or a vinegar cleaner to help remove all the baking soda.

Clean, But Not Perfect

When cleaning anything you might have an unrealistic expectation to clean everything till it looks brand new. This is a dangerous way to think. My oven is used often, even daily. My stove top is used even more. If I expect them to look new all the time I am going to be greatly disappointed and anxious.

It is important to me to keep things clean. I feel more comfortable and less stressed in a clean environment. With four kids and cooking everything we eat from scratch I can let the untidiness and used look of our house overwhelm and stress me out. But that is no way to live.

I want to embrace my home as it without being irresponsible with what I have. When my oven is full of drippings and splatters and smells like its burning every time I turn it on… I clean it with realistic exceptions of the outcome. When I can’t easily clean off stains I leave them. I embrace the used looked remember how delicious the cobbler was that make the mess in the first place.

My motto is progress over perfection. If my home is cleaner in the evening they it was in the morning I have had great success. It may still need a lot of work but progress has been made. If my oven is cleaner after I work on it then I have succeeded, even if I didn’t get it back to looking like new.