Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Natural Oven Cleaning

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've only cleaned my oven a few times this year. It had been in need of it for a couple of weeks, and I kept putting it off. Then, last week I had no choice but to prepare Thanksgiving side dishes in it and in the process I made even more of a mess.

So, yesterday I searched Pinterest for DIY natural, yet heavy duty, oven cleaners. I found several recipes, most very similar to what I normally use, which is a combination of Dawn Dish Soap, Baking Soda, and water. I slather it on, let it sit, then spray it with vinegar and scrub clean. It generally works very well, but my oven was REALLY bad. I found a tip that said to use salt and dish soap. So, I combined my usual recipe and the salt to make a new one. It worked really well, it didn't get everything, but my oven had some pretty badly burned on spots. I think Sweet Potato Casserole was the culprit. Burned on sugar is the worst!

If your oven isn't absolutely horrible, I think this recipe will work quite well. I will probably end up using the self-cleaning function on mine. I jsut hate doing it because it aggravates my lungs. It's the same reason why I don't use oven cleaner. It works really well, but two years ago I accidentally burned my lungs with chemicals while cleaning, and ever since then I have been super sensitive to cleaners.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup baking soda
2 TBS salt
1 TBS dish soap
enough warm water to make a thick paste

This is my oven before, plese don't judge me. Use a rag to apply cleaner all oven the inside of your oven, laying it on fairly thickly oven the worst spots. Let it sit overnight. In the morning, spray with vinegar, and use a gentle nylon scrubber to clean up. Use a rag and plenty of water to remove all traces of the cleaner. This is after.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to remove those last bits, I'd love to hear them. I've thought about trying the Norwex cleaning paste, as I've heard good things, but I've yet to actually look into it.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the information. Our cooker recently died a sorry death (right before Christmas, I know! *weep*). We were kindly given an old second hand one from a friend of a friend - it has apparently been in the garage a while but seems to work fine. However, it's filthy! With my own cookers in the past I've used oven cleaning solihull and oven cleaning sheffield, but they do such a good job it seems a shame to waste money on an oven I'm only going to use until new year in the sales, so this blog has been very helpful indeed thanks... I don't want my turkey tasting of nasty chemicals! ;) Thanks again, have a great Christmas :) x

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  2. I'm glad I could be of help. Merry Christmas!

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  3. When it comes to cleaning your oven, you want to make sure that it can get as clean as possible. When ovens are clean, they tend to work a lot better then if they were dirty. It may be a lot of work, but it is going to be well worth it.
    Jak Manson | https://products.magnusdist.com/ConvoCleanSolution.html

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  4. You made my life easier with these tips. I find cleaning the oven challenging every time. It's probably because I don't do it often and maybe I should start that. Never mind that thanks for helping me with your tips. You've been of great help to me and I'm sure others will be as grateful as I am.

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