This Oven Cleaning Hack Requires Little to No Scrubbing
Updated: Jul. 03, 2024
With this witty oven cleaning hack, you'll never have to scrub again. Here's how to clean your oven parts without the elbow grease!
It takes more than a little elbow grease to remove baked-on oven grime, but thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Australian mothers, one of your most dreaded kitchen chores just got a whole lot easier. This oven cleaning hack will show you how to clean your kitchen’s heavy-duty appliance without feeling like you’ve just stepped out of the gym on arm day. It’s cost-efficient, too!
The hack itself has even made its way to TikTok. Check it out below:
@aprilesllera #kitchenhack#lifehacks#cleaninghacks#dishwashingtablet#cleaningoven#foils#foils#dissolvedinwater#fypage#lockdownmood#mumlife ♬ Dinero – Trinidad Cardona
User @aprilesllera shows in her viral video how you can get sparkling-clean oven racks in just a few steps sans any harsh scrubbing. Intrigued? Let’s get started!
Prepping for This Oven Cleaning Hack
The beauty of this hack is that it doesn’t require too many materials, and most of the ingredients can be found around the house.
You’ll Need
- Aluminum foil
- Dishwasher tablets
- Gloves
- Hot water and a bathtub or large sink to put it all in
The aluminum foil reacts to the disintegrating tablet, practically melting off that post-celebration roast mess! Now, the hack does take a minimum of two hours, but the payoff of a brand-new oven makes it worth the wait.
If you need to make a quick run to the store for the items listed above, we’ll point you in the right direction. Here are some of the products we recommend:
How to Clean Your Oven Without Scrubbing
Begin by collecting all the removable parts of the oven, which includes the racks and trays. You can even remove and clean your oven window if you’re careful.
Next, you’ll need to wrap each piece individually in aluminum foil before submerging it in the bathtub or large sink filled with hot water. If you can’t keep the piece fully submerged, you’ll want to find a weight to put on top. After that, drop a dishwasher tablet on top of each, and voila!
In the next two hours, years of grease and grime will just fall away. If you have some mess that’s a little more stubborn, it shouldn’t take more than a quick wipe to get back that brand-new shine. If you want to maximize your results, let the concoction sit for a little longer. We recommend wearing gloves for the post-soak cleanup.
Here are time-saving cleaning hacks for more everyday messes.
Here’s What I Thought About This Oven Cleaning Hack
OK, I’ll let the pictures do most of the explaining here.
Let me start off by saying I was more than a little skeptical about this hack. There are a ton of aluminum foil cleaning hacks floating around on the Internet with nothing but good reviews, but the photo you’re seeing above? Who knows how long that grease and grime have been slowly building up on my oven rack (I sure don’t). But even though I had my doubts, I crossed my fingers and followed the Internet’s guidance in hope of an easy clean.
When it comes to preparation, wrapping my oven rack in foil was a little tedious. I had a few tears in the wrap here and there, so I taped them to help secure the edges of the aluminum foil sheets. With everything wrapped up, I filled up my utility sink with hot water, submerged as much of the rack as I could (I miscalculated the size just a bit), dropped in a dishwasher tablet and turned in for the night, hoping for the best.
The next morning, I drained the sink water (which was a murky color) and scrapped the aluminum foil. My oven rack looked the same. After a few minutes of washing it off with warm water and sweeping over it with a paper towel, a lot of the charred gunk actually did come off.
Would I describe my oven rack as brand-new? Definitely not. While the finished product was cleaner, there was still a stubborn coating of hardened grime. But honestly, maybe my oven rack was too far gone to begin with.
If you’re not so sure about this method, you’re not the only one. Still, plenty of satisfied users have posted their glowing results on Facebook, and the hack has been given a universal thumbs up. If you’d like to give this hack a try, we encourage you to share your results on Facebook and join a community of hackers making life just a little bit easier.
Want more cleaning tricks? Here are the brilliant cleaning tips we learned from Grandma.
Originally Published: December 21, 2018
