Lemon juice is an all-natural product you can use to thoroughly degrease and clean a grimy oven.
8photo, Creativo
Most of us use an oven for our cooking chores and it is also an unfortunate fact that the food we cook ends up dirtying the appliance. Steam, grease and splashes inevitably end up on the internal walls of the oven and on its grills and baking trays. And over time, this grime carbonizes and hardens, becoming very difficult to remove.
To clean this hard-to-remove dirt, you can, of course, use a powerful, commercial detergent; alternatively, you could choose to use all-natural products, ie. lemon juice combined with sodium bicarbonate or sodium percarbonate. Let's see how to do this below:
Use lemon juice to degrease your oven
What you will need:
- 2 lemons
- half a liter of water (ideally, demineralized/distilled water)
- an oven-safe bowl
- sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) or sodium percarbonate
- A sponge or microfiber cloth
How to proceed:
- The water and lemons
Cut the lemons in half and squeeze their juice into the bowl - then add the squeezed lemons themselves;
Add the water. - Heating
Turn on the oven and set the temperature to 175°C;
Place the bowl in the oven and allow it to heat up to boiling point (which will take about 10 minutes). - Steam action
When the liquid in the bowl starts to boil, turn off the oven and leave the bowl inside the oven (with the door closed, of course) for up to 1 hour;
The steam will help dissolve away/loosen charring, carbonized residue and greasy grime. - Cleaning
Whilst taking care not to burn yourself and wearing protective gloves, dip the sponge or cloth into the lemon water and scrub down the oven's internal walls;
To remove particularly stubborn grime, sprinkle some baking soda or percarbonate on it and scrub away using more of the lemon water.
Remember to rinse the sponge off using clean water before dipping it back into the bowl.
Variations on this cleaning method
Zen--Garden/Reddit
Here's another way you can clean your oven using these all-natural products: you can mix lemon juice and sodium percarbonate (or baking soda) in a bowl to make a paste that you can use to clean your oven. To make this paste, use 3 tablespoons of lemon juice and add 3 tablespoons of baking soda (or percarbonate). Mix these ingredients to create a homogeneous paste, adjusting the ingredients as necessary to achieve this. If you use this paste-based cleaning method, there is no need to heat up the oven (but it should be warm/cooling down).
Spread the paste over the grime in your oven and leave it on to act for about half an hour before scrubbing it off; if necessary, spray the surfaces with a mixture of water and lemon juice as you scrub to improve the degreasing action. Once done, rinse off with warm water.
These all-natural products will not give off an unpleasant smell (like many chemical oven cleaners do), but you should ventilate the kitchen during and after the cleaning process. Additionally, take care not to directly inhale any vapors produced in the oven when you open the door.
