Chemical Free Oven Cleaner... WIN!

If anyone had told me that you could clean an oven without dangerous chemicals I would have laughed at them. And then I turned into the hippie mom I am and I became determined to find a way. Here's where Pinterest is again the most wonderful website IN THE WORLD.

Enter, this pin. I didn't believe it... I mean yes, vinegar and baking soda clean my counters just fine. The stuff isn't baked onto my counter tops though... My counter tops haven't baked more pizzas than Papa Johns... I was fully prepared to write another fail post. Until I tried it...

This is exceptionally embarassing. I haven't cleaned my oven in, um, ahem, a while. We'll leave it at that.

Here's what you do:
First, scrape out the chunks of burned pizza goodness or whatever might or might not be in the bottom of your oven... Mine was, as you can see, free of nasty bits of charred dinner. Haha.

Take a spray bottle and fill it with vinegar and water. I would assume you could use straight vinegar, but the original blog said to use a mixture. I did a ratio of 2:1 vinegar to water.

Spray your vinegar water all over your oh so yucky oven.

Then take a box of baking soda and sprinkle it liberally over the moistened oven nastiness. Like so:

Immediately, it will begin to bubble and fizz. This is good. This is what keeps you from having to scrub for six days to get all that garbage out. You can see that I used A LOT of baking soda and vinegar. The less scrubbing, the better for me. Because I don't like cleaning.

Leave this to do it's magic while you wash dishes, watch Days of Our Lives, or knit.. I'll leave it up to you all to figure out which ones of these I did and which ones I didn't. You can leave it for 10 minutes or almost an hour.

Right before I started cleaning, I sprayed and sprinkled again. This was in hopes of having to do even less scrubbing.

I then took a bit of steel wool and pretty much just gently rubbed in a circular motion and all of the gunk came off!! Don't believe me? LOOK!

That's me, IN THE REFLECTION of my oven door! Taking a pic of the amazing work that I didn't have to do! I used the steel wool and then just wiped the stuff off with one of my awesome knitted dishcloths. I would say it took less than 15 minutes to do the entire oven.. I still haven't done the racks yet. Had to go get the kiddos from Mother's Day Out. Darn, right?

Does it smell? Sort of, vinegar doesn't have the most pleasant odor. But I didn't feel like I needed a gas mask or a hazmat suit to clean. And it was easy. And cheap.

Go now! Clean your ovens! Report back!