A week ago, the top of our main oven cavity caught fire. Not massive flames or anything like that but enough to give me the willies. I turned the oven off and quickly shut the door, starving the flames of oxygen. Luckily, it worked.
I don't know if your oven is the same but at the top of ours there is a heating element and above that the oven's ceiling. It is very hard to get at that ceiling for cleaning purposes and I must admit that there had been a build up of greasy deposits up there. That is what caught fire.
Naturally, I did not want to use the main oven again until it had been cleaned. I contacted the most well-known oven cleaning companies in the area but neither of them got back to me in spite of repeat messages. So I thought, "Sod them! I will give it a go myself!".
With some difficulty I managed to get hold of a pound of bicarbonate of soda (American: baking soda) and also treated myself to some rubber gloves. I removed the oven door and put on my "Varta" headlamp which proved to be very useful with the cleaning job. At least I could see what I was doing.
I wrapped strips of aluminium foil around the element and then using an old toothbrush and dish washing brush started to apply the simple paste I had made with the soda powder, a little table salt and water. The paste was difficult to apply because of gravity but I managed to get enough of the stuff on before a late bedtime.
The next day I scraped the stuff off moving as carefully as I could between the winding tongues of the element. I reckoned that I had removed enough of the carbonised mess to make the oven safe again but it could still do with a thorough professional clean-up.
Before tackling this job, I watched several YouTube videos about oven cleaning. Each time, I left a comment that went something like this: "Several helpful tips but the video entirely failed to deal with cleaning the ceiling of the main oven!" And yes, I did not find a single video that even mentioned cleaning the ceiling of the main oven cavity.
Before using the oven again, I chopped a lemon in half and stuck it in a Pyrex bowl with a pint of water. This was left in the main oven at 200℃ for twenty minutes just to freshen up the cooking chamber.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/hg0SyBr