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Cleaning an oven is one of the most intimidating kitchen chores. It generally requires scrubbing, stooping, and commercial cleaning products that have no place in an appliance that gets super hot and comes in contact with food. It’s no wonder most people put it off until they have no choice: that inevitable moment when a baked-on spill starts to smoke every time you turn on the oven.

Our approach reduces the amount of labor and eliminates harsh chemicals. It’s been refined with help from Caroline Murphy and Christina Trunzo of Great Green Cleaning, who have a combined 60 years of experience cleaning kitchens, and from Amelia Hensley, a mechanical engineer and cleaning expert at GE Appliances.

What makes an oven so difficult to clean isn’t always an occasional spill, explained Trunzo, but rather the fats that aerosolize with each use, sticking to every surface. Going forward, if you wipe your oven down with a little soapy water after you bake or roast, it may rarely need any scrubbing at all.

This will take between 40 minutes to 2.5 hours for presoak (or the length of your self-cleaning setting) plus at least 15 minutes of active cleaning.

Scratching your oven’s exterior if it’s stainless steel. Cleaning powders and scour pads easily leave marks. Murphy suggests equal parts water and rubbing alcohol and cleaning with the grain using a soft cloth.

Using too much soapy water. It just runs out the bottom of your oven through the holes, said Hensley, making a mess on your floor.

Using a vacuum cleaner. Oven crud contains grease, which is not great for vacuums.

This article was edited by Amy Koplin, Brittney Ho, and Sofia Sokolove.

Rachel Wharton is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering ovens, stoves, fridges and other essential kitchen appliances. She has more than 15 years of experience reporting on food issues and a master's degree in food studies, and has helped write more than a dozen books on that topic (including her own, American Food: A Not-So-Serious History). One of her first real gigs was reviewing kitchen gadgets in less than 50 words for the New York Daily News.

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