Best way to clean your oven

Best way to clean your oven

 Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You cook or bake something and, accidentally, something drips onto the bottom of the oven. You forget about it or don’t notice until the next time you preheat. You’re going about your meal prep when, suddenly — smoke! This can be annoying at best and an emergency at worst, but it is a very preventable situation. You need to clean your oven.

When to clean your oven

Not only should you be wiping up your oven after each messy use, but you also need to clean your oven thoroughly every three to six months. If you rarely cook with your oven, you may be able to get away with a once a year spring clean, but some even say that you should clean the oven once a month, especially if you use the oven frequently. Proper and frequent oven cleaning helps your oven operate more efficiently. Leftover food particles in the oven can also make your food taste funny. To get the best bang for your buck out of your oven, treat it nicely and clean it once in a while.

Once a week, make sure you wipe down the door to the oven. This gets rid of grease and food splatter that can build up inside the oven.

How do you know you need to do the full clean? You can usually tell visually. If there is visible food debris stuck to the inside of your oven, it’s time. Can you smell anything amiss? If you start your oven and smell the last thing you cooked or, worse, a mix of everything you cooked this week, it’s time to clean the oven. Perhaps obviously, if there’s any smoke when you preheat the oven, you need to clean it right away.