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No one looks forward to oven cleaning. You put your oven out of commission for hours and heat up your house with the “self-clean” cycle or wear a Haz-Mat suit to use a heavy-duty oven cleaner. Instead, make a DIY oven cleaner using Baking Soda to dissolve grease and get a clean-oven shine.
A Natural Oven Cleaner Without Harsh Chemicals
If you’ve ever looked at the ingredients on the label of a commercial oven cleaner, you know it’s a laundry list of chemicals. Conventional oven cleaners contain a range of chemicals such as potassium hydroxide, monoethanolamine, sodium hydroxide, and butoxydiglycol. These and other chemicals can irritate your respiratory system and burn your skin, lungs, and eyes. Directions for using a commercial oven cleaner recommend wearing long gloves and avoiding inhaling the fumes. Understandably, many people are concerned about using these chemicals around their families and pets or in an appliance used to cook your food.
Fortunately, there is a natural alternative to commercial oven cleaners, and you don’t have to worry about wearing gloves to use it. As a bonus, it costs a fraction of the price of spray-on oven cleaners and it doesn’t leave a chemical residue that can cause odors the next time you use your oven.
Basic Oven Cleaning with Baking Soda
Baking soda is non-toxic, inexpensive, easy-to-use, and remarkably effective on cleaning oven grease. Baking soda is alkaline, and oven grease made of food particles is typically acidic. Baking soda neutralizes acids and breaks down the grease, allowing you to wipe it up without a lot of elbow grease. It’s also a mild abrasive, so it works well at removing dried, stuck-on foods. You don’t have to turn your oven on, and you can use it immediately after cleaning with baking soda.
In most cases, baking soda works its magic in just 15 minutes, making oven cleaning less of an arduous chore and more something you can do in the span of a single episode of your favorite sitcom.
The basic baking soda oven cleaner recipe for regularly cleaned or lightly soiled ovens is as follows:
INGREDIENTS:
⭐½ cup Baking Soda
⭐3 tablespoons water
INSTRUCTIONS:
⭐In a small bowl, combine the ingredients to make a paste roughly the consistency of pancake batter.
⭐Remove the racks from the oven.
⭐Using a rubber spatula or a gloved hand, smear the paste over the dirty parts, whether metal or glass. Avoid the heating elements.
⭐Let the paste sit for 15-20 minutes.
⭐Wipe up the paste and loosened dirt and grease with wet paper towels.
⭐Wipe the oven’s interior with a wet paper towel, using water or a 3:1 mixture of water and distilled vinegar.
⭐Repeat if necessary for tougher stains, or try the heavy-duty method below.
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