Seriously, this should be national news! I actually cleaned my oven. Yay!!! Honestly, I wouldn't have cleaned it but the putrid burnt smell every time we tried to cook or bake was starting to get to all of us. If my man can smell it, it is pretty bad! He can't smell anything compared to my "super" nose as he calls it. I have self cleaning ovens. I know, I'm spoiled. Actually, I would be totally spoiled if the oven makers of the world would get together and put a nice vanilla smell in the actual oven-self-cleaning mode. It may just be my ovens, but every time I turn on the self cleaning ovens, it stinks and we all have to leave the house or keep the windows open. It's bad! A Vanilla scent would be so nice. They just need to get with the Febreeze peeps and maybe even the people who make little pine trees for cars. Self Cleaning Oven Scents, I called it first!
Anyway, there was so much junk in the bottom of my oven from things that had bubbled over and the salt that I threw on top of it to cut the burning smell, that I thought might be too much for my self cleaning button and way too much for the Easy Off cleaner. So what is a girl to do?
I got on Facebook to avoid the whole oven issue. And guess what was waiting in the news feed? A guy that cleaned his oven the "easy" way. Yeah, right! I read some more and thought to myself that this couldn't be any worse than the smell that fumigated my beautiful home every time I tried to cook a meal....or warm up our take out pizza. Hello Martha? Not so much lately, these days.
The facebook link mentioned doing a little something and then leaving it overnight. Perfect!
Warning! UGLY oven pictured below. I can't believe I'm posting this for all of the world to see. Yes, this is my oven. I was serious about sprinkling salt on things that bubbled over.
To Clean your oven:
Preheat to 150 While the oven is heating, put on a pot of water to boil. Once the oven has reached 150 F, turn it off and pour 1 cup of ammonia into a heat safe bowl or baking dish and place it on the top rack of the oven. Place the pot of boiling water on the bottom rack, close the oven door, and leave them both in the oven overnight.
So far so good! No putrid smell and it was as easy as boiling a pot of water! I'm liking this!
In the morning, I opened the oven door removed both the bowl of ammonia and the pot of water. Don’t dispose of the ammonia; you’ll want to use it later. Add 1-2 teaspoons of liquid dish soap to the ammonia, along with a quart of warm water, and using a heavy-duty nylon scrubbing pad dipped in the ammonia mixture, begin to wipe away the softened grease and grime along the sides and bottom of the oven. It should be a fairly easy job at this point. Wear kitchen gloves. It didn't take longer than 10 minutes to do this step.
This is what my oven looked like after rinsing and scrubbing a bit:
Looking good but still needs a bit of work! I grabbed Easy Off Cleaner and did a little more work which yielded this:
Much, much better! I smile every time (the one time) I use my oven. The putrid burnt smell is gone. Hallelujah!!! And I feel a bit more like my inner Martha-self is smiling now too!