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Hi! I'm Amy, and I have something shameful to admit: my household of five people hadn't cleaned our oven for over six months before I finally said 'okay, this has to change". Worse, I used to be a cleaner, so I really have no excuse for letting it get this bad (apologies, apologies, apologies for the vile pic below, but you need to see what I was working with).
Of course, while your oven might not be quite as manky as ours was, I do know from my old cleaning job that it's one of the most neglected parts of people's kitchens. And the worse it gets, the less inclined you are to clean it (at least that's what happened to us, anyway). Plus, anyone who's deep-cleaned an oven before knows how time-consuming, greasy, mucky, and just plain annoying the ordeal can be. I was ready to try something new for all our sakes.
Luckily, in a moment of dirt-based desperation, I remembered a trick my old cleaning colleague swore by that apparently made deep oven-cleaning a scrub-free, wipe-and-go dream: you just have to make a three-parts-water, one-part-baking soda paste, plaster it all over your oven and racks, cover it in clingfilm, leave it for a few hours (ideally overnight), and wipe it all off. Had to be better than the corrosive, strong-smelling options I had been using (which still required tonnes of scrubbing), right?
So, somewhat skeptically, I popped on some gloves, made the paste, and plastered it to the inside of my oven. (Side note – grab yourself a massive bottle of baking soda, like this 500g Duzzit one. You'll go through like three regular-sized tubs otherwise).
Now for the trickiest bit of this process IMO: applying the clingfilm. This took me about ten mins, and taught me the meaning of the word 'regret'. After all, I was using regular clingfilm instead of the massive rolls we used at work: when I do this again, I'll be sure to use something like this option. The regular kind was okay for the inside of the oven and stuck surprisingly well to its walls, but wrapping the racks with the smaller roll was fairly annoying, messy, and time-consuming. Still, the whole process was over a lot sooner than I'd expected, so I reckon with the aid of a bigger roll you could have this down in five mins.
(And to save you a lot of time and mess, here's the best approach I eventually found for the rack-wrapping process if you only have supermarket clingfilm: lay the top half of the oven rack on an unravelled, but not cut, piece of clingfilm and pour a tiny bit of the solution in. Then, fold the top of the clingfilm over it like you're closing an envelope, wrap the newly-unravelled clingfilm over the top, tilting the rack towards the closed-off end, and cover the back again: pour, and cover once more. Or, you know, get a big enough clingfilm wrap to begin with).
I left the concoction overnight, then waited until about midday the next day to get cracking. (Psst – I swear by these steel scourers to *properly* take everything off first time and these extra-long gloves to keep my arms free from splashes. You'll want to cover the floor under your oven in newspaper too – spills are inevitable and very gross.)
I started with the racks, because I know those fiddly fiends are the toughest to clean. I placed them in the sink, unwrapped the clingfilm, and got to scrubbing – I genuinely couldn't get over how quickly and easily the grime went off. I'd say I spent about five minutes scrubbing on both racks before rinsing them, which made my previous twenty-min-per-rack scrubbing sessions with other products seem completely ridiculous. Okay, okay, I was starting to feel like all that wrapping was worth it.
Then, I got to work on the inside of the oven – this was ridiculously easy, and NGL, it was *deeply* satisfying to watch all that sludge come off in grossly gratifying rivulets. I'd say it took me about five minutes to clean. Again, though, be very careful to cover the floor underneath during this stage. The ~ooze~ is real.
My personal fave part, though? Watching that grease-encrusted glass come up clear after just a couple of swipes from a scourer. This was the one I really couldn't believe – usually I have to scrub and scrub to get my oven door looking right, but this was a wipe-and-done dream.
For both of these, I needed to wipe the surfaces down after scouring with a sponge and hot water – this took less then a minute. Side note – you know that annoying bit under the oven door that collects all the grime, but which you can't get to without removing the whole front of the oven (which you can't even do with ours)? Yeah, at work we used to wrap a kitchen roll around a butter knife and swipe it through with the door shut to clear the residual grime. This was my final stage, and after that, our oven was ready to use without The Shame for the first time in months.
So all in all, yes, I'd 100% recommend this hack. I know there are lots of cling film-free baking soda leave-on treatments that people swear by, and I've used it myself for less mangy ovens; but for dire cases like ours, I reckon the clingfilm is worth the extra hassle. It traps the moisture in, forcing the product to really eat away at that annoying grime. Bonus points for the fact that it doesn't involve any extremely corrosive chemicals or leave any strong smells behind!
