Cleaning cooked-on food off of a stove can be a task that ranges from difficult to impossible. When the food is greasy, sticky, or burnt, the cleaning prospects look even grimmer. Some messes leave permanent stains, and especially if you're renting your living space, you can't afford to leave the space looking anything but pristine. So how can you reverse some of the damage and prevent new stains? By clever use of aluminum foil.
The component that usually sees the worst of the messes and staining are the electrical coils. The coils get oil and food spilled on them and the food often cooks onto the coil immediately, causing a strong burnt smell and a dark stain. Thankfully, there is a way to get the food off once it's cooked on! The video below describes how to use foil to scrub the coils clean.
The next hardest components to clean are the burners. The spills that dirty the coils often end up in the bottom of the burner, where the food can get almost as stuck and cooked on as it can to the coils. The burners are also where a stain or mess can be most noticeable. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to prevent future messes from affecting the coils, but there is something you can do for the burners to make them super easy to clean up--wrap the burners in aluminum foil! Just remove each burner, first removing the coils, and wrap each burner in aluminum foil, being careful to make sure the foil conforms to the shape of the burner and that a hole is made in the foil for the coil to go through. Below is a video, showing the process in detail.
So, what about the rest of the stove top? Although, the stove top is not usually the hardest part of the stove to clean, cooking still often bubbles over onto it leaving splatters that may or may not be so easy to wipe or scrape off. And scrubbing the stove top with aluminum foil might not be the best solution, especially if it's coated with paint that's easy to scrape off. So, if you're really looking for easy clean-up for stove top messes, you can cover your whole stove top with foil, as shown in the video below.
But why stop with your stove top? Baking often boils over in the oven, and oven racks can be a pain to clean. Thankfully, like burners and stove tops, oven racks can be wrapped in aluminum foil, which again reduces clean-up to the simple replacement of foil coverings.
And, just when you thought aluminum foil couldn't get any more useful:
So what are you waiting for? Go buy some aluminum foil and start mess-proofing your stove and oven. Then you can use your newly mess-proofed oven to heat up the leftover pizza you've wrapped in foil. Just don't forget to press in the perforated triangles on the sides of the box of foil; you'll find unrolling and cutting the foil to be a lot less of a struggle, because the roll won't jump out of the box all the time.
