Stoves never stay perfectly clean, even when the rest of your kitchen is spotless. Every splash and splatter covers your stovetop a little food residue. Grease, sauce, scattered spices, and random food particles all build up on your stove every time you cook. While the splatters between the burners can be easily cleaned, what about the baked-on food? What about the spatters around and even on the burners that form into an impenetrable blackened crust. So how do you get it off? How do you clean your stove without destroying the cooking surface or taking the pliers to your burner coils? How do you cook regularly yet keep your stove beautiful enough to compliment your new stone countertops?
That is exactly what we’re here to cover today: 10 techniques to remove burned-on residue from your stove.
1. Baking Soda Scrubbing
Start with baking soda. This natural scrubbing powder is also mildly base, like a soap. The base baking soda breaks down acids, which helps to scrub away food residue. At the same time, the sharp soda particles make an excellent scrubbing powder to simply scrape away your burnt-on food. Often, just soap, water, a sponge, and some baking soda sprinkled heavily over the surface is enough to break the burnt-on food off of the stovetop glass or enamel.
2. Baking Soda Setting
Another option is to let the baking soda soak into the top of your of your stove surface. Mix baking soda in with a mild cleaning liquid like hot water, vinegar, or lemon juice. Add enough baking soda until the mixture makes a paste. Now spread the baking soda paste over the entire surface of your stovetop or over the worst burnt-on areas. Let the baking soda paste sit for 15 to 20 minutes while it dissolves, then use it as a scrubbing paste to remove and wipe the stove clean.
3. Borax Scrubbing Powder
Another option for scrubbing powder is borax – a natural salt that is also a non-toxic cleaning product. Like baking soda, the crystal particles of borax are extremely sharp on a microscopic level which makes it a great supply for scrubbing really stubborn baked-on grime. Borax is a common kitchen cleaning product and is often used in homemade soaps. Alone, borax empowers soap – helping it to suds and create the crud-dissolving chemical process, while also scraping away at the crud without damaging enamel or glass.
4. Plastic Spatula or Putty Knife
Another method is simply to flip the baked-on crud off of the stove surface. This works because the crud is more cohesive to itself than it is to the smooth surface of your stove. Using a spatula (flipper) or a surface-safe putty knife, you can push against the base of the baked-on stove crud until each small pile comes loose from the surface.
This doesn’t work with all crud and sometimes works best when you have dissolved the surface but the crud mounds still remain solid.
5. Mr Clean Magic Eraser
We don’t often talk about a specific brands of cleaning product, but a few items stand out as unique and useful. The Mr Clean Magic Eraser is notorious for solving cleaning problems that other materials can’t hack. While magic erasers are destroyed in the process, you can often put a magic eraser to use dissolving otherwise impossible burnt-on crud challenges. If you have something that just won’t soak and scrub away, try a magic eraser. Again, the magic eraser will shred, so apply it after softening up your stove surface with a few other methods first.
6. Baking Soda Toothpaste
Some natural brands of toothpaste use baking soda as a natural cleaning, scrubbing, and whitening agent that is also known to be chemically non-toxic. What this amounts to is highly concentrated baking soda paste that also happens to be mint-flavored. If you’ve got a few bad spots on the stovetop, apply a layer of baking soda toothpaste. You can also use sponge, dish brush, or hard-bristled tooth brush to work the toothpaste into the grime you are trying to scrub away.
7. Scrape with a Razor Blade
A razor blade is an expert’s cleaning utensil. Razor blades are potentially dangerous to you and can also scratch the surface of both glass and enamel stovetops. However, used correctly with a horizontal tool, you can scrape the razor flat across the surface to help remove any layer of particle, grime, or residue from the stovetop. The great thing about a razor blade is that it separates crud from the stove, just like a flipper or putty knife but with more power to start that separation – not just take advantage of it. A razor can define on a very fine level the difference between stovetop and the crud stuck to it.
8. Barkeeper’s Friend
Barkeeper’s friend is yet a third type of scrubbing powder. It is a well-known and long-time respected cleaning solution for kitchens, bars, and prep areas. Barkeeper’s friend uses a mixture of different non-toxic cleaning powders to hit your stovetop with everything that your scrubbing arm can unleash in combination with a damp sponge.
9. Cooking Oil
While most people think of oil as making a stove dirty, oil can also help clean the stove. Clean cooking oil can be poured onto the stove and used to help dissolve other more stuck-on particles. As you may have guessed, oil can also help to dislodge the baked-on crud that could be flipped or razored off the surface. Oil can soften crud so it can be scrubbed away and decrease the bond between crud masses and the stove surface.
10. Chemical Cleaners
Last but certainly not least are chemical stove cleaners and oven cleaners. These are powerful, often foaming, formulas designed to sit on the stove surface for several minutes dissolving everything that covers the surface. This can create dangerous fumes and can burn the skin with extended contact, which is why we have recommended this method last.
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Does your stove match the beauty and majesty of your new countertop design? If you already have a gorgeous stove, take the time to keep its surface gleaming alongside your beautiful stone countertop. You can also make plans for a new range, even a custom range, by talking to your stone fabricators about where and how you’d like your stove to fit into your new kitchen design.