Cleaning the oven: it is done too little and always rather unwillingly. It will be because it is uncomfortable. It will be because there is always something to rub. We use it daily, leaving out the ordinary maintenance and creating monsters difficult to defeat.
Some of the best built-in ovens on the market are pyrolytic, making the whole cleaning process easier. What if your oven does not have this function? Taking advantage of the heat produced by the electric oven, some methods allow us to clean it effectively without any effort and without using chemicals.
So let’s see how to clean the oven naturally and effortlessly.
Table of Contents
1. Baking soda and salt
It is impossible not to start from the best-known natural detergent used to clean and sanitize all domestic surfaces: bicarbonate, a precious, economic, ecological, and irreplaceable ally of spring cleaning.
Amalgamated with coarse salt, the bicarbonate produces an excellent sanitizing compound, which can be spread with a damp cloth on the appliance walls without the need to rub. Turning on the oven at 35/40°C will enhance the bicarbonate’s cleaning and descaling action: it will be enough to wait about an hour and go back comfortably with the same cloth rinsing it at each step.
This is the most effective method if we are wondering how to clean the oven caked for years. Another perfect compound for cleaning the electric oven is composed of baking soda, vinegar, and water.
Must pass it on the metal components without the need to rub. The trick to perfect cleaning is to fill a baking container with that liquid and put it to cook for a while. The optimal temperature to set is, in this case, 100°C: an hour will be more than enough to make the most stubborn dirt and grease run off the walls of the oven without any effort.
2. Vinegar
Vinegar is a powerful degreaser, often preferred to chemical products, especially in the kitchen: it degreases, sanitizes in-depth and helps, and cleaning – to avoid the formation of bad smells. It is useful if used together with baking soda, but also alone, diluted in water.
To thoroughly clean an encrusted oven, turn it on at 120°C, and insert a pan with water and vinegar solution for about a quarter of an hour. Once the oven has been turned off, the most stubborn dirt and grease will be very easy to remove with a simple damp cloth when it has not yet completely cooled.
This type of cleaning is beneficial if bad odors have formed inside the appliance over time. White vinegar is, among other things, known for its disinfectant virtues.
Vinegar is also excellent in combination with coarse salt: once you have finished degreasing the walls with a white vinegar bath, you can pass them with a cloth and coarse salt. Again, the passage will be instrumental in scratching away the most stubborn dirt, and there is no danger of scratching the surfaces.
3. Lemon
Even more than vinegar, Lemon is one of the most useful products fighting bad smells in the refrigerator and the electric oven. Whether this is ventilated or not, it will sooner or later form bad smells due to cooking food, especially fatty ones such as meat. So if your oven smells bad, try cleaning it with lemon.
Just squeeze the juice of three lemons into a pan full of water. Once the oven is preheated, at about 100°C, the pan is inserted: the vapors of the water and lemon mixture will free the walls of the oven from incrustations, and your appliance will give off a pleasant lemon scent.
To complete the cleaning, it will be sufficient to remove the softened dirt with a damp sponge. You can also use the lemon to degrease and clean the oven walls thoroughly: split a lemon in half, use the two sides as sponges, and pass them on smooth surfaces.
A few more tricks
If not even the proposed methods have had the desired effect, some tricks will help clean the oven even in the most difficult cases due to too stubborn dirt that has been there for years.
The spatula we use to defrost the car windshield in the morning, for example, is of great help in cleaning the walls: by adhering perfectly to smooth surfaces, it allows us to clean even the finest of incrustations. Then wash it all off with a sponge or cloth.
How to clean the oven caked for years faster than the bicarbonate-based one? Coca-Cola is excellent for dissolving the burnt stains, which often form on the dripping pan (the pan supplied in ovens and ovens). If left to act for a few minutes, its high corrosiveness reaches even the most stubborn burns and perfectly cleans the metal surfaces. For an optimal result, it is recommended to heat the Coca-Cola, as suggested above, for baking soda, vinegar, and lemon.
It is perhaps useful to know that these methods – ideal for cleaning the electric and ventilated oven – are also suitable for the microwave oven.
Baking soda, vinegar, and lemon, in solution, must be heated for about two minutes in the oven. Once the cycle is finished, you can wipe the microwave walls with a damp cloth, possibly microfiber. The only precaution, perhaps obvious, is in taking care to remove the glass plate from the oven, to be cleaned separately with simple dish detergent.
Why natural remedies in the kitchen?
We have seen how to clean the oven naturally, but specific products are intended for cleaning ovens and grills. It is always advisable to pay attention to chemical products for cleaning the tools used for cooking: especially in the presence of high temperatures, some chemical components can be reintroduced into the environment and end up on our food.
We have seen that it is possible to clean the encrusted oven for years without effort, even using exclusively natural products commonly used in the kitchen, which are also very cheap and easy to find. Furthermore, to ensure that no dangerous residues have been left, wash the surface by rinsing it.