Clean Your Oven with Baking Soda

As part of the 34 Weeks of Clean Crew our task this past week was to clean up our ovens and microwaves.

While we own a microwave we don’t use it (but plan to try this nifty Ivory experiment in it one day). But our oven on the other hand gets used almost daily!

We technically have a brand new oven that is only 6 months old but already it needed (like that past tense) some pretty heavy duty cleaning. By contrast my sister has had her oven for 7 years and it looks better than our 6 month old oven!!

Our oven is also gas, which is new to me, so I was a little  nervous about what to use to clean it. It has a self cleaning feature but I’ve never used that. I’ve never been comfortable with the self cleaning option on any oven so I just tend to bypass it. In the past I’ve used Easy Off Fume Free.

When we first started using our oven we put a sheet of foil paper on the bottom to catch any spills. That little addition has already served well. My husband loves to bare cook on the rack like it’s a grill or something so that foil is an oven saver. I change the foil every few weeks or so. The sides of our oven weren’t that dirty but it was definitely the oven door that could use the most help.

Our oven door, once see through, now was tinged an orangey/brown color from splatters of who knows what.

So I decided to focus my cleaning efforts there.

My book Clean if Fast, Clean it Right has a few tips for cleaning ovens. The first option was to turn off the pilot light on your oven and set a bowl of ammonia inside overnight. The next day wipe the gook with clean paper towels (as opposed to dirty).

I admit I don’t know anything about a pilot light in this oven and I just wanted to clean the oven door so I went with baking soda.

Here’s how I cleaned my oven door with baking soda

1. I made a little paste of the baking soda with some water and applied it to the oven door with a clean sponge.
2. I left the door open and went off to do other things for a few hours.
3. When I came back I wiped up all the baking soda and the black gook that came with it. Voila!

The door was really clean. There were a few spots that may have come off with a longer set or some elbow grease but since the oven look 90% better I went with what I got and I’m making a point to add this to the monthly to-do list.

Thoughts

I was really surprised at how much stuff the baking soda by itself removed. Yaay! Nice clean oven door. My husband was impressed and surprised. He loves to cook too and it always commenting on how we need to clean the oven.

Now before you go don’t forget to pick up the printable for this coming week’s challenge. We’re in the dining room for the next 7 days and I made you a table setting printable. This works well for teaching your young children to set the table.

And if you’re following along be sure and check in over at Faith, Family and Fridays.