apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Sadly, I know of no good non-toxic way to clean ovens. Believe me I have tried lots of things like baking soda, vinegar, and even good old "elbow grease". Oven cleaner is a form of lye, which is why it works, baked-on grease becomes almost a form of plastic that is resistant to normal cleaning.

I've been a professional housecleaner for most of my adult life, and I won't clean ovens any more, my lungs are too fragile. The only advice I have is if you use the oven cleaning spray you don't need to get the oven hot for it to work, just spray it on a cold oven and let it sit for at least 10 or 12 hours, it will gradually dissolve the "crud". Be sure to protect your hand and skin, use gloves and cover up.

I have tried the baking soda paste method too and find it works to a point, and only on horizontal surfaces (which will be fine for your pie leaks).

I haven't tried the ammonia technique, but am at a loss for what would work on the sides and top of the oven...

I've tried the baking soda and vinegar paste, and it worked fine. I left the solution overnight, not just for an hour. The hardest part was getting bits of baking soda out of nooks and crannies.

I'm no expert on cleaning burned-on oven messes, but when a tart or pie pan leaks, IMMEDIATELY cover the leaked liquid with salt and continue baking as usual. When the oven cools down, the salt/liquid mix can be cleaned up much more quickly and easily (a damp rag with a little Dr. Bronner's worked pretty quickly in my oven).

Note: this works best with liquid from fruit pies.

Please try this:
Cream Scrub by Ecover.
It has honestly changed my life.

Porcelain sink gone brown because of long use? DONE! Turned it white.

Dirty stove with rust and burns? DONE! Turned it clean.

Even old dirty pots and pans are shinning a new. It is all completely natural and biodegradable. It really works.

Also, it really helps if you apply a thin layer and then scrub.

I read through the comments above and decided to give a "natural" product a try. I went to Whole Foods and looked for Cream Scrub but of course they didn't have it. (They did have the laundry dtergent and the car wash.) One of the people suggested Mrs. Meyers Surface scrub. I bought it ($4.99) and brought it home.

Surface Scrub pretty much did nothing for the inside of the oven door and when I tried it on the bottom of a frying pan I got the same results. The yellow/brown crud was still there.

I then tried Barkeepers Friend and got very good results. The oven door and the frying pan were clean.

I'd like to support the natural cleaner movement, but this is just one of many failures I have experienced with those kind of products. The first rule for a cleaner is that it has to work. Then I would consider whether it is eco-friendly or not.

Mrs. Meyers Surface Scrub fails the first rule in a big way.

I'm inclined to agree with the first post -- I'll use the baking soda / vinegar methods for spills, but nothing non-toxic seems to work on the baked on spatters on the sides of the oven. However, I have to admit I haven't tried the ammonia thing for more than a couple of hours. Our oven must not be sealed well, so it makes the air in the apartment intolerable.

I finally broke down and used regular oven cleaner, and it is almost miraculous how well it works.

Natural cleaning methods all work okay if you do them pretty regularly, but none work as well as chemical oven cleaner, and none let you leave the oven for as long without cleaning it. I wish there was a better "green" method for oven cleaning, but I'm still personally not willing to use lye-based cleaners, they honestly kind of scare me (and I don't have a hood fan in my apartment to get rid of the fumes).

I've had pretty good results with the "leave baking soda paste on for a long time" method, but I've found that it didn't get really baked on stuff, just fairly recent stuff. Plus it always leaves behind at least a little bit of baking soda residue (you can get it off eventually, with water, but it's time-consuming). still, I prefer it to using lye-based cleaners, since I don't really care about having a perfectly-sparkling clean oven.

You can also make a paste out of baking soda and dish soap (use as little dish soap as you can while still getting a paste). This is a good abrasive cleaner, and gets most burned stuff off, but it's a real pain to rinse off.

One tip I have for people trying out green oven cleaning for the first time: if you've used lye-based cleaners in the past, go ahead and just wipe everything down with water before you start. You don't want chemical residue coming into contact with any other cleaners.

Newish ovens with self-clean cycles are propably the most reliable "natural cleaning" system. They come totally clean with just heat (although I don't know how much energy they use heating up, so they may not be all that environmentally friendly - especially since you can't cook with that heat because the oven fills up with smoke).