Whether you’re cleaning up a new apartment or just needing to wipe up a spill, taking apart your stove components and scrubbing away all the drips and drops can be a challenge.
To make sure you get all the food particles wiped away as you clean, take apart your stove from the top down. Use a degreaser and scrub away!
How To Clean Stove Top Grates
If you have a gas range, the burner parts will be easier to access and clean. Cleaning authorities recommend vinegar for a regular degreasing.
Regular Maintenance
- Every time you use your stove top, let things cool down.
- Then spritz the burners with vinegar, allow it to work for fifteen minutes,
- then wipe it away.
This will remove grease before it can be cooked onto the metal grates.
Difficult Cleaning
- For extremely hard to remove cooked on grease drippings, you can boil the grates in vinegar.
- You can also soak each grate in ammonia by sealing them in a heavy duty plastic zipper lock bag.
* Be sure to rinse well with fresh water before re-installing.
Both of these cleaning methods will require plenty of fresh air. Vinegar is pungent and ammonia is caustic, so open the windows and turn on a fan or move part of this project outside.
How To Clean Stove Drip Pans
Whether your cooktop is electric or gas, the main thing you must do is clean up the spill as soon as it happens. Let everything cool down, take things apart and get to work.
The question of how to clean burner pans gets more complicated the longer the food and grease is allowed to burn onto the burner grates and drip pans.
Electric cooktops may force you to unplug the burner to get the grate and drip pan out, and may be the only way to get to underside of the burner rings and to get at the drip pan.
- Once you’ve got things apart, wash the burners and drip rings in hot soapy water while keeping the electric plug dry,
- then mix a paste of baking soda and water and let it bubble away on the burned on grease for twenty minutes.
- Scrub away the paste and the grease that’s been released by the bubbling action, and rinse.
How To Clean Oven Racks
The grates inside your oven can be a challenge to clean. They’re too big to soak in the kitchen and can require a lot of detailed scrubbing.
Cleaning authorities with TheKitchn.com offer a great suggestion for cleaning your stove grates in the bathtub.
- Line your bathtub with old towels to prevent scratching.
- Add enough hot water to the tub to cover the racks, then add half a cup of dishwashing liquid.
- Leave the racks to soak overnight, and in the morning clean them up with Barkeeper’s Friend to scrub away any remaining grease.
How To Clean The Oven
While the racks are out of your oven, you can scrub away any grease drippings from the bottom. The bottom of your oven is actually one of the easier places to clean, because you can let cleaning products sit and work away.
It should be pointed out that many ovens have a self-cleaning feature that gets the oven extremely hot and burns drippings and spills away to ash. Some people are uncomfortable getting their oven that hot.
Chemical oven-cleaning sprays are also available, but the fumes from these can be worrisome.
If you don’t mind a little scrubbing, there are less toxic ways to clean your oven. Baking soda is an ideal cleaning product for the bottom and sides of a dirty oven. Kitchen and cooking authority The Pioneer Woman offers a simple method for spot cleaning your oven.
- Mix baking soda and water into a paste and spread it over the sides and bottom of your oven.
- Let it sit for a day, wet it down again, and scrub it off. To speed the process, you can apply the paste and spritz it down with vinegar. This will bubble away grease and burned on food quickly.
Cleaning up a dirty stove can be a simple process of taking things apart and cleaning each component with a degreasing agent.
As possible, clean things up before the grease gets cooked on. The simple combination of baking soda, water and vinegar can bubble away a lot of mess.
