Clean Your Oven After the Christmas Frenzy
Posted on 21/12/2015
How to Clean Your Oven After Cooking Christmas Dinner
What with all the Christmas dishes, there will be quite the aftermath for your oven. All the greasy plates and baking and chicken and geese, and bean foods, the oven will be in quite the state after all is said and done. Are you prepared to handle the oven cleaning among other things when New Years Eve is well behind you? Because after all the holiday cheer and activities end all you will be left with is your New Year’s resolution (which you are probably already itching to break) and a whole home cleaning to handle, with a special emphasis on the kitchen cleaning and gathering of decorations. But your oven especially will have sustained so much damage that you will spend a lot of the time that goes for getting the home clean on it. But to make the process both easy and thorough, here are various methods to implement:
• Baking soda
Starting with the green methods, baking soda is probably one of the best ways to treat your oven. It’s abrasive, so it does not let any grease or grime stand after a good rubbing and the use of soda paste, which is made by mixing water and soda and is one of the best remedies for dirt-related oven problems.
• Heating up
Another way to deal with the dirt in the oven is by heating it up for about ten to twenty minutes. After that simply mix some water and dish soap as you are waiting for it to cool off a bit and scrub carefully at the problematic spots to shine it away.
• Ammonia
You can take a towel and soak it up in ammonia. Place it inside the oven and leave it there for a few hours or even overnight. After that take the towel out and use water and dish soap to completely cleanse the oven’s softened dirt. Ammonia makes everything much easier to clean, so it is one of the preferable solutions.
• Newspaper
If you are not a person that seeks elegant solutions and only want something that works, simply use the window cleaning approach. Take a newspaper, scrunch it up, soak it a bit with water and scrub away at the oven’s problematic spots. This is a great way to get rid of grease and grime, but if you want a thorough shining of the oven, you will need to add something to the mix.
• Nail file / Sandpaper
More difficult food stains which have been neglected might reach a solid state. And those can be dealt with the bit more brutish, but still effective method of using a nail file or sandpaper to scrape off the problematic spot. While this is a wonderful approach to old and used up ovens, if you have a nice new and shiny one, it is not a recommended route to take as both the nail file and sandpaper will ruin the appearance of your oven.
• Boiling water
Using boiling water is also a nice organic method. You simply have to pour a fair amount of hot water in the bottom of the oven and wait for the food stick there to soften up. This method can, however, only be applied for the bottom and not the sides. The steam from the boiling water might affect the foot bits there, but it is uncertain. In any case, simply soak up the hot water once it cools with a towel and then use again water and dish soap.
• Lemon / Lemon juice
And, of course, after all the oven cleaning is done, you can commit to disinfecting it and use either a whole lemon, or water and lemon juice to sanitise the inside of the oven. This is a great way to also deodorise the oven.
Use these methods to repair all the damage that the Christmas cooking did to your oven and then re-do them in your weekly cooking routines. At least now you will have the training and knowledge of how to handle them.
