thanksgiving

Do Not Self-Clean Your Oven Before Thanksgiving. Here’s Why.

Cambria Bold
Cambria Bold
Cambria Bold is the Executive Editor of Cubby, and one of Apartment Therapy Media’s first full-time editors from way back when. She was The Kitchn's founding Design and Lifestyle Editor as well as Managing Editor of Re-Nest, Apartment Therapy’s late '00s green living site. She now thinks a lot about design, kids, and designy kids' things. She lives with her two daughters and their father in St. Paul, MN.
published Nov 24, 2014
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With Thanksgiving just a few days away, you may be thinking now is the time to push that self-clean button on your oven so that it’s spick-and-span and ready for cooking. Here’s why that’s a very bad idea.

As we’ve written before, self-clean cycles can be really hard on your oven. The super-high temperatures required to burn everything into oblivion can sometimes have the unintended consequence of burning out the heating elements and control panel, too, particularly if you have an older oven.

What does that mean? It means you just broke your oven a few days before Thanksgiving. In other words …

(Image credit: Blogspot)

Exactly.

There’s never a good time for your oven to break down, but there is definitely the worst possible time for it to happen, and that’s right before you’re scheduled to cook a dozen dishes on one of the biggest food holidays of the year.

So, unless you want to get on your hands and knees and give it the ol’ elbow grease (and here’s how to do that), we say leave your oven be until the last guest has departed your home in a tryptophan coma.

Has your oven ever broken right before a major food holiday?

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thanksgiving