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Grease is notoriously difficult to clean off anything because the molecules are hydrophobic and won’t dissolve well with water-based cleaners. And few places accumulate more nasty buildups of baked-on grease than in an oven. The common strategy is to spray a cleaner like Easy-Off Heavy-Duty Oven Cleaner or Goo Gone Oven & Grill Cleaner, wait the three minutes the instructions recommend, and then start scrubbing and scrubbing — seemingly forever. But of all the oven-cleaning hacks you need to try, there’s one that will save a lot of effort and protect you from sore arms, and it doesn’t involve the oven’s clean setting or your bathtub.
Before you get started, remove the grimy oven racks and take them outdoors so the fumes stay out of your house. Essentially, follow the directions on the canister. That means spraying them liberally with the cleaner from about 9 to 12 inches away to ensure an even coating. Then you just wrap them airtight with plastic wrap, either from your kitchen or the kind you buy for moving. Alternatively, you can use a large plastic trash bag.
In either case, you can let the racks stew in the cleaning liquid for at least 45 minutes, up to overnight, while you go off and do something else. By the time you get back, your cleaning fluid of choice should have penetrated the grease enough to let you wipe it off rather than endlessly scrub.
Why this is one of the best ways to clean your oven racks
Whatever you do, never leave your racks in the oven during the self-clean mode. At best, it causes them to discolor, and at worst, it can damage the coating, making it difficult to slide them in and out of the oven. The idea behind the plastic bag or plastic wrap method is to keep the racks immersed in cleaner longer, reducing scrubbing and limiting fume exposure.
Those fumes are also why you need to take your cleaning party outside or somewhere with good ventilation. Specialized oven cleaners are caustic, meaning they dissolve organic material. That’s why they can cause chemical burns on your skin and why you should always wear protective equipment like gloves and eye protection when using them. It’s also why you want to avoid inhaling them. They can cause severe irritation to your airways, even causing symptoms like chest pains and difficulty breathing.
This method is also virtually scrub-free, making it easy to clean your oven racks more often. Ideally, you want to clean them every three months or so, sooner if a baking experiment goes sideways. But many people use the top, middle, and bottom oven racks for different foods (as you should), meaning some racks may need to be cleaned more often than others.
