Cleaning the oven with steam: What professional hydrolysis ovens can do, you can easily do yourself. Here’s how it works.
Cleaning the oven – just the thought of it puts most people in a bad mood. So much so that many people spend a lot of money on self-cleaning ovens that burn the dirt or work with steam. However, the latter method can also be done with any normal oven.
Cleaning the oven with steam
Cleaning the oven regularly is unavoidable. Because even if you are careful when cooking and baking, grease fumes settle in cracks and hard-to-reach places. In addition, there are sauce splashes, blobs of dough and other stubborn crusts.
However, scrubbing by hand is tedious and often frustrating. Chemical oven cleaners, on the other hand, are expensive and harmful to health. A trick with steam provides a remedy here: It ensures that cleaning the oven is much easier and that burnt-on stains do not occur in the first place.
In the case of self-cleaning ovens, this process is called hydrolysis. However, it is very easy to do it yourself.
For this you need:
Pot (suitable for oven), casserole dish or deep baking tray
hot water
Vinegar (alternatively: washing-up liquid)
This is how it works:
Preheat the oven to 230 °C. Even better: You use the residual heat of the oven immediately after cooking and baking.
Boil the water with the kettle. Fill the pot (or casserole dish or baking sheet) with the hot water.
Add some vinegar to the water. This prevents the water vapour from leaving limescale residues. In addition, the cleaning effect of the steam is enhanced. Don’t worry: you can hardly smell the vinegar afterwards.
