How to Clean Oven Racks

How to Clean Oven Racks: Your oven racks are quite a pain point when it comes to cleaning. You see, you can’t leave them in a self-cleaning oven cycle, and they’re nearly impossible to scrub effectively. But they do look awful after a few thrills and spills and can lead to bad smells and burning, charred gunk over time. So I’m going to show you how to clean your oven racks with next to no effort at all. Within hours of you will have cleaned your oven racks, and the other will do it within hours. It’s that easy. Okay, enough is enough. Let’s get going. Oh, but first I want to tell you if you notice I am congested, it is true. Here’s what you’ll need — an old towel, either a soft sponge or a cleaning toothbrush or both, about a cup of laundry detergent. Now you can use the powdered kind or the liquid kind. I prefer the powdered kind for this job. But if you can’t find that, liquid is okay. You can also use dishwashing detergent, which will work just as well. Again, powdered or liquid will work either way. And finally, a bathtub or at least some other kind of tub, which is big enough to fit your entire oven rack into. Pretty easy so far. I am officially standing in my tub. I have all of the supplies that we need. So let’s get cleaning. Lay the towel down on the bottom of your bathtub. This is going to protect the surface of your tub from being scratched by the oven racks or the powdered detergent. It’s an important step, so do not skip this one.

Next, we’ll take our dirty oven racks and just place them on top of the towel. Then plug the drain and start filling the tub with the hottest water possible. We’re going to let the tub fill until the water completely covers the racks. Hot water is really important here, my friends. It helps break down the grease and activate the detergent. It will cool over time, but the initial blast should be muy caliente. Finally we’ll take a cup of the laundry detergent or the dish detergent, and as you can see I’ve dissolved it in some hot water and then added it to the tub to ensure the product is broken down well. But because I also like the powder because you get that abrasion, I’ve sprinkled a little bit of extra powder on the bottom of the towel so that way you get a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. And that’s it. Now we’ll let the detergent do its thing for the next to hours. It’s probably just best to leave it be overnight and give it enough time to really loosen that caked-on grease and grime. So we’ll see you in six hours. At this point, all we need to do is wipe off any remaining residue, and it should come off fairly easily. You can use a cleaning toothbrush or a soft sponge or cloth to get into those spaces and voila a clean oven rack. Well, I didn’t quite time myself, but I’ll say I was scrubbing anywhere between and minutes, and I was just using this soft sponge and I used a little bit of the detergent for some added abrasion. Now, the results are pretty excellent.

They didn’t come with me just pulling the racks out of the soupy situation going on over here. Of course, there was a little bit of elbow grease involved, but it was nowhere near the amount of scrubbing that I would have to do had I not done this overnight bubble bath for the oven racks first. Now, I will tell you dish detergent is designed to work specifically on this type of mess, this grease. So if you can find powdered dish detergent, go for it. I didn’t have any, so we used laundry detergent, and it works just fine. But I wonder if you used dish detergent if it would work any better. It’s important to note that you should never leave your oven racks in the oven during the self-clean cycle because it can strip the chrome off the rack and permanently damage it. The oven self-cleaning feature is not designed to clean the racks, and besides this method is so easy it’s like they clean themselves anyway. Also, if you have an oven with those coil burners, you can throw in the drip pans overnight in the tub as well.

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