Plain old baking soda and vinegar will do amazing things for your oven! I just make a paste and let it sit for a few hours. Then all I have to do is wipe it out. Seriously.

I like to use CitraSolv, the orange one. I usually find it at Whole Foods or other natural grocery store.

I tried the baking soda & vinegar thing, but didn't get much of a result until I started scrubbing with steel wool. Possibly not a good thing to do to your oven's interior, so use at your own risk, but it was relatively quick considering the 1.5 years of build up I had in there.

From http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/blog/springing-deep-cleaned-home: "Clean your oven by covering it with 1/4 inch of baking soda. Spray water over the works until thoroughly wet but not drowning. Spray again at bedtime and in the morning everything will wipe effortlessly clean." This worked almost as well as billed, and without stinking up the house/wasting energy like self-cleaning. Only the toughest spots required some elbow grease with more baking soda/water.

How do you put a 1/4" layer of baking soda on the walls of the oven?

I read a good tip (on here, i think) that someone posted for cleaning the oven racks. Put them in a (clean) bathtub and fill the bathtub up with the hottest water from the tap. Add a capful of laundry detergant, and let it sit overnight, then just rinse in the morning.

How do you get your walls dirty? :)

Mike, you can make a paste of baking soda and water and I'm sure that'll help. I use this on my glass-top stove to remove scorched spots and it works great there, too.

Make a paste with baking soda and water and coat the oven. I leave mine overnight. The next evening (I clean after work!) I'll wipe out as much of the dried paste as possible and then use water to wipe out more. Then, spray with vinegar to react with the rest of the baking soda (vinegar + baking soda = carbon dioxide, water, sodium acetate) and wipe that out. Viola! It works better than self cleaning cycles from my own experience!

the self-cleaning cycle shortens the life of your oven significantly...

Do you guys think that the oven should be unplugged, while following the baking soda + vinegar method? I haven't (ever, gulp...and gross) cleaned an oven before and am a bit nervous about it...

Ims001 Roast one chicken, and you'll see....

Ugh! I could have used this post last week, since I tackled the much-put-off task of oven cleaning over the weekend (you don't even want to know how long). Elbow grease only did so much though, I'll try the soda approach tomorrow!

Rental ovens are the bane of my existence (mine only has one rack!!!), so these tips are actually pretty awesome. If I have time this weekend, I'm totally going to give it a go.

Boiling water. I pour it then let it sit while it cools enough for me to use just a sponge to scrub. I had cooked on crud covering the bottom of my oven when I moved into my new house and it worked like a charm. It is also great on the stove top.

Cleaning the oven is definitely my least favourite chore and I have avoided it at all costs as I never found anything worked, but the other day I tried using baking soda. Mixed with a bit of water to make a thick paste and smeared this all over the inside of the oven and oven door. I left this for half-an-hour and then spent 15 minutes with a scouring pad and a little elbow grease and one year's worth of splatters pretty much all disappeared!