4 tips for preventing a mess in your oven during cooking

When you take a look at a messy oven, you undoubtedly think of the moment when you’d have to clean it. Oven cleaning is, by all means, a scary prospect, since it features sticking your head in the narrow space of the oven interior, some elbow grease and time.

What if you could minimise the need to clean the oven? Well, that sure sounds wonderful. It gets even better since it is possible and highly likely to preserve your stove in a clean state by implementing a few preventive measures when cooking.

Here’s some advice:

• Cook in enclosed containers only – one of the best ways to prevent the oven mess is to prepare food in enclosed containers. As something cooks inside the oven, high temperature evaporates liquids (including fats) in the dish. Even though that looks like steam, it is, in fact, excellent spray saturated with grease. As it lands on the surface of the oven, it cools off, allowing the fat to condense and show. Needless to say, re-heating it only starts the process and leads to the fat being transferred all over the oven interior. Covering the food while cooking it is a sure way to prevent this. A casserole dish with a lid works nicely since it prevents steam from escaping into the oven and keeps the meal moist and extra tasty.
• Pre-cook roast for crackling effect – if you are madly in love with the crackling on a roast meal, you might want to consider a way to reduce the grease deposits in your oven. Thankfully, there is a way to do just that. Cover the roast with aluminium foil and cook it for about three-quarters of the total cooking time. Remove the foil for the final quarter. Heat will be directed and crisp the roast to perfection, without adding grease splatters all over the oven.
• Add a tray for spills – if you wish to be preventive, place every single dish on a baking sheet. Lip the edge/rim of that sheet so that in case of overflow, the spill can be caught before reaching the hot oven surface. Further lining the baking sheet with aluminium will save you quite a lot of elbow grease. Cleaning the sheet then becomes as simple as throwing away the foil liner.
• Keep a roasting tray in the oven – there are two recurring problems with most ovens. One is that you need to find storage space for your roasting tray. The second one is cleaning the oven of all the food splatters and spills. Keeping the roasting tray on the bottom of the oven as you cook provides a solution to these issues. You needn’t consider any other storage space, and you have the tool to catch all drips and spills. Simply take the roasting tin to the sink and give it a good clean. It is far easier than doing thorough oven cleaning.

Play it smart with these preventive tips the next time you are cooking. You will find they are quite helpful for reducing the hassle of oven cleaning.

© Specialist Oven Cleaners