Do you know how to clean an oven because I didn’t know how to clean an oven until just recently?
And after doing a ton of research, I found a lot of awesome tips that I wanted to share with you today. For example, did you know that you don’t want to use sodium hydroxide on your stainless steel?
Didn’t know that. Okay, maybe you can call me a dummy,but hey, you might not know the same thing. So I’ve got a ton of great tips for you today. Let’s get to it. And I think you’re really going to enjoy this tutorial. Always follow the cleaning directions for your specific oven. In this case, I’m doing a little bit of a test though. I mixed together some baking soda with water into a paste and put it on the door, the window, and on the inside of the oven.
Now, this is a self-cleaning oven, and I wanted to see how well the baking soda and water mixture will work before Iself-clean. And sure enough, on the inside, it worked out really well. You can see it cleared off a lot of the grease. Now let it sit there for about 10 minutes. Soon the window, though, it didn’t work out all that well. It did not remove the grease the window. As you can see here on the door, it did do a pretty good job. And soI would recommend the baking soda and water mixture—again, consistency of Elmer’s glue.
The other thing that my directions said to do was put dishwashing liquid onto the glass, and let it sit there for about 10 or 15 minutes. And then the directions said scrape it off with a straight razor. And then what I did was absorb the rest of the soap using a paper towel. And as you’ll see, there’s a section the corner there where I’d let it sit for about 15 minutes, and it worked really, really well. If you do have a self-cleaning oven, and you’re going to self-clean it, you should remove the racks. Now sometimes you don’t have to do this, but I decided to do it anyway. You’ll also have to clean the frame of the oven.
I just used a sponge and water because it wasn’t all that dirty—not inside the oven; you’re going to expose the foodstuffs. But you’ll have to clean that frame. And don’t touch this wire mesh insulation strip because if you abrade it, you’ll ruin it. So just leave it the way that it is, and then clean off the frame of the oven door. You want to create a really good seal between your door and the oven because it’s going to get up to about 500 Celsius. So you’ll have to remove any foodstuffs that have fallen on the inside of the oven, too. Remove those with a sponge and/or a paper towel, whichever is going to be best for you.
Close the oven door; make sure it seals well. Turn on your vent hood to the highest setting possible or open up a window if you do have a vent hood because it’s going to get hot. Press the self-cleaning button. So just press it. Typically, self-cleaning lasts between 3 and 5 hours. And when you press the start button, it will lock all the doors as a safety precaution. And in this case, my oven ran for about 4 hours. Mix together 1⁄4 cup of blue Dawn dish washing liquid into both sides of your kitchen sink. And what you’re going to do is soak the grades from the oven in this mixture. Put a towel underneath the grate, on top of the countertop so you protect the countertop from being damaged.
What you’ll do is you’ll take your sponge, remove any excess grit or foodstuffs from the top. You can use that Dawn dishwashing liquid mixture to do this. Take off any of the burner tops, and soak them into the kitchen sink mixture. Again,if you have any kind of really bad staining, what you can do here is you can use ammonia. Now I only recommend doing this if you really have to. Use a 1⁄4 cup of ammonia in a plastic container, and soak that burner top. Now I’m doing this per the directions again of the oven, and leave it there for a few hours. Okay, I got to say that ammonia is not my favorite chemical to use, and I only recommend this if it’s your last resort.
And be really careful with using ammonia around chlorinated products. As a matter of fact, do not mix ammonia with any chlorinated product because it’s super dangerous, and they can hurt you. So stay away from that. Take off any of the other items from the top of your oven. Put them into that Dawn dishwashing liquid mixture. Now, in this case, I wanted to show you something. I was going to use Super Clean to de-grease the top, but I couldn’tbecause it has sodium hydroxide in it. And that’s a no-no for stainless steel because it will ruin it.
In this case, you’ll notice that the burner top has a lot of grease on it. And one of the things that I wanted to do is, again, try the baking soda and water mixture. So I mixed it up to that Elmer’s glue consistency. And I put it on top and let it sit there for a good 10 minutes to absorb any of that grease. Then I use the soft side of the sponge, not the Scotch-Brite side, to clean that off. And mind you, I’m doing all this while the oven is self-cleaning, so it’s a little bit hot and just be careful not to burn your fingers.
Then what you can do is wipe the top off really good using a microfiber cloth and then move on to these Weiman stainless steel wipes. Move in the direction of the stainless steel grain, and then clean off any of the excess moisture using that microfiber cloth that works really, really well. Any scratches what you see here are not from this process. They were from prior cleaning processes. So again, once your grates are soaking, clean them with a sponge either Scotch-Brite regular side. Now here’s the deal. You can use Steel Wool to clean the oven racks. You can first approach it with a sponge, then you can go and use the steel wool to clean off the rest. Take the burner tops out of that ammonia container. Soak them and then rinsed them in that same warm soapy water. And then clean off all the burner tops best you can.
The burner grates look really good after that15-minute soaking and scrubbing off of the sponge. The burner caps look good, too, after the ammonia and soaking. The burner heads, not too shabby. I put everything back together it was. You may want to take a picture of your setup if it’s complicated so you know how to put it back together. But what’s the inside of the oven look like after the 4-hour cleaning? The door window, it’s okay. I’ll get into that in a second. The inside will have a residue on it that you’ll have to clean off using a sponge with just water. Around the frame, it looks pretty greasy still. So I’m going to have to use the water and baking soda mixture there. The inside looks good, again, except for around the frame, but the self-cleaning worked really, really well.
Now the door window. I really think that what I’ll have to do here is again put some Dawn dishwashing liquid on it because there’s still a fair amount of grease on the top except where I used the Dawn dishwashing liquid. Now the oven racks look sparkling clean. I think the steel wool worked really, really well. And here’s what the top looks like. Again, any scratches are from prior cleaning. But overall, I’m really happy with the process. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But does it have to be perfect? I mean, we’re just going to be using it in an hour or two after this cleaning, right? Well that’s how you do it. That’s how you clean an oven and get it to look awesome.
And if you’ve got your own tips, please add them to the comments section below because,guess what, I don’t have all the answers. I’m not an oven-cleaning guru, right? So you might have some really awesome ideas that you want to share with the world, and don’t afraid to do that. Thanks for watching the video. I really appreciated. If you think that this video can help somebody else out, like a friend or family member or just a miscellaneous person in the world, go ahead and give it a thumbs up over YouTube. Click on the thumbs up button. That way somebody else will see it. And remember, if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to subscribe—click on the subscribe button—because that way you’ll get one of my new DIY videos that come out every single Friday. There’s a ton of great tips, and I wouldn’t want you to miss out on them for your own house. All right. Thanks again. Have a great day. I’ll see you in the next video.