The Joy of Baking Soda, Miracle Degreaser

Just had a lovely experience. I was washing some greasy fluorescent light covers. They are big, long and hard to clean.

More frustrating was the grease that was sticking to the nylon brush I was using. Rather than removing grease, I was spreading it around. Plus I was temporarily ruining my nylon brush. What to do?

On the vague hope that baking soda can be used as a degreaser, I googled baking soda degreaser. The following web page showed up:

How to Make a Natural Degreaser

Now I had a little more hope. The above web page claims that baking soda is one of 6 natural degreasers. Furthermore, it suggested that baking soda has at least some value as a degreaser even with no other ingredients mixed in. I had to give it a try!

I was already using Palmolive Ultra Dish Liquid, Concentrated, Original Formula dish soap. My sink was full of warm water and Palmolive dish soap. To this I added approximately 1 cup of baking soda.

Voila! The dark stains on my nylon brush cleared almost instantly! And the grease started coming off the long fluorescent light cover rather than just being pushed around. Wow! This mixture really works!

I really didn't expect baking soda to be so effective! I thought it might work a little bit, but I didn't think it would work almost instantly!

It makes me wonder what other secrets I've been missing out on. Why have I not been doing this for years?

You're probably wondering how the light covers became greasy. Well, we have an extended family member who is from the fast school of cooking. Faster is always better.

I simply cannot believe the distance that grease travels when this person cranks up the heat on the stove top and sends airborne grease all over the kitchen. Unbelievable! This person cooks meat on the stove top.

Oddly enough, this person also seems to feel that meat, such as hamburger, does not have enough grease on its own. The first step to frying any meat on the stove top is to grease the pan and crank the heat all the way up, or almost all the way up.

I think you can see the problem. A cast iron pan at high temperature sends hugh amounts of grease airborne. This grease forms microdroplets which can easily travel upwards and away from the stove 10 or more feet. It's amazing, really.

The person who always cooks using a faster-is-better methodology started out in life very poor. People who have had a hard time growing up sometimes see life as something to be endured. This person definitely sees cooking this way. Cooking brings her little joy. She gets it over with just as quickly as she possibly can.

Tolerating relatives, especially elderly relatives, is something I regularly do. Sometimes it's easier to tolerate something than it is to try to change it.

Since I'm also tolerating all the grease spatter, baking soda makes it much easier to deal with. Thank you baking soda!

Ed Abbott

Cleaning Oven Vents With Ammonia?

A woman wrote to me today about
her oven vents being dirty:

Ed,

I thank you for the awesome advice on cleaning
the inside of my oven with baking soda. I hate
the toxic fumes that are left behind from store
bought cleaners.

I do have another problem, though. The vent holes
at the top of the door on my double oven are an
unsightly mess. I have tried toothpicks and
tweezers to remove the residue, but most of the
accumulation is greasy and sticky.

Any suggestions on what I can do to clean this
area?

Ruth

I'm going to suggest something I've not tried
myself: ammonia and water.

In browsing the web, I find several sites recommend
ammonia as a natural degreaser. It seems that ammonia
cuts grease.

My best understanding is that both ammonia and water
evaporate. I'm going to speculate that that is why
ammonia and water are frequently used to clean glass.
Glass is not really clean if there is any cleaning
residue left.

Since ammonia and water eventually evaporate into the air,
I'm guessing that this is why ammonia and water make a
good combination for cleaning glass. Since the cleaner
itself evaporates, there is nothing left to stick to your
glass and streak your glass.

The reason I'm leaning towards ammonia and water is
because the person who wrote to me describes their
oven vents as being greasy and sticky. It
sounds to me like her problem is largely a problem
of grease accumulation.

If this were my problem, I might gather the following
things to clean the vents:

1. Gloves to protect my hands
2. Ammonia purchased at the grocery store
3. An empty dish soap bottle
4. A cleaning sponge

I would wait until I've used up a bottle of
dish soap. I would then save the empty
bottle.

I would then put on my gloves and take the
empty bottle and pour ammonia into it. I
might only fill the bottle half full in
order to make it easy to work with.

I would then pour small amounts of ammonia on
my sponge and start cleaning the grease around
my oven vents. I would be careful not to do this
to a gas oven (natural gas, for example) as ammonia
can be explosive if it is heated to too high a
termperature.

I suppose I might feel at liberty to try cleaning
with ammonia if the oven's pilot light were off.
However, if I was not absolutely certain it was
off, I'd probably be better off skipping the use
of ammonia altogether.

In any case, I'd use as little ammonia as possible
to clean the vents. I'd probably make frequent trips
to the kitchen sink to wring out the sponge and get
the grease out of it.

The whole strategy here is to clean around the vents
without allowing foreign materials to enter the
vents. Since both ammonia and water are said to
evaporate, having a little bit of ammonia and water
enter the vents might not be as disastrous as having
other substances, including baking soda, enter the
vents.

A special concern I have with oven vents is that
they can be the gateway to the air layer that
sometimes lies between two layers of oven glass.
You don't want to clean your vents only to see
streaking on the inside layer of your oven glass.

The inside layer of oven glass is unreachable
from both the interior of the oven and the
exterior of the oven. The last thing you
want to do is to preserve streaks of cleaning
fluid forever between layers of glass.

All of this is speculation on my part. I've
not personally ever tried to clean my oven using
ammonia.

I would think you'd want to be especially cautious
if you have a breathing condition, such as asthma.
I've read that ammonia is quite irritating to both
the eyes and to the lungs. It is for this reason
that I'm suggesting that you use as little ammonia
as possible.

That, in part, is why I'm suggesting using an empty
dish soap bottle. Just as you use a dish soap bottle
to control how much dish soap you use, so you can use
it to control how much ammonia you use.

One more note of caution. Never mix ammonia and chlorine
together. If I understand correctly, the two together
form chlorine gas.

When I was in high school, my friend Charlie did this very
thing. He was mopping the kitchen floor at the restaurant
where he worked. He wanted to improve the ammonia formula
that he was using by also adding chlorine to his mop bucket.

If I recall right, his boss stopped him from doing this just
in the nick of time. Charlie telling me this story in high
school was the first time I learned that ammonia and chlorine
together form chlorine gas --- the stuff used to kill soldiers
in the trenches in World War I.

So don't do that. Don't try to improve your cleaning formula
with chlorine.

All of the above is pure speculation on my part. In searching
the Internet for solutions, I found no solution that addressed
oven vents only. It seems that oven vents are a very special
problem.

I would be disinclined to use baking soda on or around oven
vents. There is a danger of getting baking soda between layers
of oven glass. After this happens, it seems the only solution
is to disassemble the entire oven door to clean between the
two layers of glass.

Please be cautious if you try any of the above suggestions. This
is all uncharted territory for me. There's a big difference between
trying something that has never been tried before and trying something
that is tried and true. Consider the above suggestions as suggestions
only and as something that has not been tried before.


Ed Abbott