Cleaning Your Oven - An Experiment and a Lesson Learned

My oven was really dirty and I wanted to clean it. Naturally I went to Pinterest to find a recipe using household items because I don't like the harsh fumes of the store bought cleaners.  I found several ideas that were basically the same.  I thought I'd give it a whirl.

This is the picture of the oven AFTER I cleaned and scrubbed and waited 3 more hours.  More on that in a moment.

This is a picture of my nasty dirty oven BEFORE I got to scrubbing and waiting.

Um, eeeew!  I use my oven a lot and yes it gets dirty when you use it!

The filth spares no space, its not partial to just one area, its everywhere!

Yuck-oh!  This stuff is baked on good.  It's going to take some elbow grease to get this awful mess off!

The glass on the door is the reason I decided to clean my oven.  So much yuckiness that you cant even see through it to see what's happening inside the oven! Gosh!

Have you had enough of my dirty oven yet? Yeah, me too!  Let me tell you about my experiment now.

I used 8 tbsp dawn dish soap, 8 tbsp baking soda and 6 tbsp distilled white vinegar.

I mixed it in a large bowl and just to warn you, it will foam.....a lot!

I used my green and yellow scrub sponge and dipped it in the mixture and generously applied to the filth and scrubbed and scrubbed.  Wait 20 minutes and according to what I read on Pinterest it should wipe clean, just like that! Um No, no it didn't!  I scrubbed more and more and more and more!

What about the dirty oven racks you ask?  Well, there is a homemade remedy for that too!

Bounce and Dawn or Dawn and Bounce....either combination works...kind of!

Fill your bath tub with HOT water just enough to cover the racks.  Add 3/4 cup Dawn while water is filling.  Let stand for 8 hours.

Please be very careful when handling your oven racks, because they will cut you! Ouch!

This did work well to get most of the bits that were stuck on off.  Drain the water and use your Bounce sheet to remove any remaining grease.  Yes, this worked pretty well, not perfect back to new, but pretty well.

This is the AFTER picture for after I scrubbed and scrubbed!  Much better, but NOT clean!

This is how it looked after I used the self cleaning featuring on the oven and waited the 3 hours it took to clean it!

OMGoodness! So much better.  It's like new!  Why didn't I just do this first?  I don't know, but next time I will do this first.  I think the mixture above would have worked on an oven that wasn't very dirty.  But, if your oven is really dirty like mine, it DOES NOT work!

The moral of the story and the experiment is:  Use your self cleaning featuring if your oven has one OR clean your oven using the above mixture more often than not!

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

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