My oven is in desperate need of a good clean after all the grilling, roasts, baking that has taken place in its cavity!

the inside of my oven

Manual or smart cleaning. Having tried to manually clean it – takes a lot of elbow grease and not always getting the muck out, I decided to try a self-cleaning method that’s been going online with differing methods for different cleaning methods.

How to clean an oven naturally

Clean Your Oven without Toxic Chemicals

Firstly, cut a lemon in half. Squeeze the juice into an oven-proof dish. Add water to about 1/3 of the dish. Leave the lemon halves in the dish.

Bake in the oven at 120 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Farenheit) for 30 minutes. We shall see later if this works.

I don’t know about you, but it looks as mucky as before albeit with a nice lemony smell – which I love.

I guess the next step would be elbow grease time, no running away from it.

What I normally do, is to heat up the oven at 180 deg.C (375 deg.F) with some water in a dish and turn it off so that the dried bits would have a chance to actually loosen itself off from the steam.

Next step, put a drop or two of liquid dish washing detergent into some warm water. Use a dishcloth and the water to manually clean off the oven. It usually works quite well except for the corners where it is hard to get into and the areas where the heating element is (aka the coils). Do be careful not to burn yourself by making sure the oven has cooled to a warm temperature before you start to clean.

Have fun……………