If it ever happens again save yourself a lot of time and elbow grease. Scrape off what you can and then use oven cleaner. Works like a charm to get off all the crud. You still have to follow up with the polishing step to get it looking brand new but it really gets all the gunk off easily.
I once burned a pot full of mac’n’cheese in a stainless steel pan – like, inch deep pure carbon deposits. :eek:
A call to my mother got this suggestion: enough water in the pan to cover the burned gunk, and a quarter cup of regular old baking soda. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour (add water as needed to keep the burned stuff covered) then turn off the burner and just let the pot sit over night.
The next morning there was this floating ‘island’ of burned stuff! And when I dumped that out, the pot itself was pristine.
Just a hint in case you do it again. It takes overnight, but very little of your own time, and saves you all that scrubbing.
I’ve had better luck with vinegar mixed with salt, left overnight. Dump in a ton of salt and just enough vinegar to wet it all, after leaving it sit for a while everything washes right off.
Thanks for all the tips! I tried the baking soda and vinegar trick, and it seemed to require more elbow grease than I can muster for the polishing stage, so I think I’m going to try salt and vinegar before I resort to spending money on things I don’t already have in the house. I will, however, get myself whatever ends up working on hand just in case this happens again.
I haven’t come across “washing up powder” but I always heard this tip with biological washing powder, the sort you use for laundering clothes.
As for the pan, my theory is that if it won’t come off with prolonged soaking fierce scrubbing, it won’t come off in, or otherwise taint, anything else I cook in the pan! Plenty of my pans have discoloration on the bottom which resists any efforts to remove it, and I have never had a problem.
The stain is mostly gone and most of the pan is shiny with little bits of discoloration from where the vinegar and salt couldn’t quite get the stain off. I’ve given up for now in favor of not having pans hanging around in the sink for the time being. Next time I cook with it, I’ll make an effort to use it for something that might get the residual crap off of the bottom.
Not to worry…we had a nearly identical hijack recently, which brought about this explanation post.
As for what it says on the above mentioned doohickey, I was going to say that it’s not of much use: “Progressive International Corp”, which didn’t sound like a kitchenware manufacturer to me. It seems I was wrong. However, I couldn’t locate the doohickey in question on their site.
Yeah, that’s what I meant in the first post. Biological clothes detergent powder Sorry, that was my mistake, washing up powder does imply a product lke fairy liquid or the likes. oops :smack:
And agreed with Colophon, I have a couple of pans that are discouloured at the bottom from cooking ‘mishaps’ and they don’t affect the food. Just makes the pans have a bit more…character.
I burned rice like this a few years ago. Accidently turned up the heat to ‘high’ instead of ‘off’. The whole kitchen was soon filled with smoke! Anyways, I scrubbed, soaked and scrubbed away as much of it as could, which was almost everything. There were a few, tiny spots left, and being lazy like I am, I just left them. It was a good quality saucepan and I didn’t want to throw it out. The spots disappeared very quickly with use. I’d just suggest that you scrub away as much as you can,. which should be almost everything (I started from ½ cm rice burned into coal), and then use it as normal.
Please don’t try this without a little research first, but what about just popping it in the oven and running the self clean cycle? It wouldn’t melt would it?
I don’t think my oven has a self-clean cycle… well, at least if it does, I haven’t discovered it yet. Either way, the problem is pretty much solved. There’s very little residue left on the pan and I’ll just use it a few times to get the last wee bits off.
Sure it does. I’ll show you when I get home. 
I had to go to the oven to check just now to make sure you weren’t telling some horrible joke about my vagina. 
im wondering what the ratio is for the V/BS i know it can get very messy. never made the volcano in school 
Well, it’s been six years since I burned that stuffing into the pan, and have managed to get whichever pan it was clean enough that I can’t tell the difference between it and the other pans.
As for the ratios, you might have luck with this article.
Sorry I wasn’t around in '07 when this zombie was fresh.
However, since it’s been resurrected, I figure it won’t hurt too much to add my 40-cents:
My wife occasionally burns black stuff onto the bottom of her stainless steel pots or pans. I dunno how she does it, but she invariably leaves it up to me to wrestle with the clean-up. It occurred to me that an excellent treatment would be to generously apply some kind of acid (tomato will do) with heat in a paste-like format over the blackened spots for twenty minutes or so. Hmmm…
I make spaghetti sauce (with slightly-charred meatballs) in the affected equipment, making sure to let the sauce come to a quick boil and then simmer for at least a half-hour (primarily to let the flavors soak into the meatballs). After serving dinner and storing the remainder of the sauce (and pasta, for that matter) I take a steel or copper scrubber to the thing and scrub it in hot soapy water. I don’t even have to scrub all that hard. By the time I’m done – five minutes, tops – the steel is sparkling again.
This has worked in 99% of the cases my wife has given me.
—G!
Some guys make barbecue skills into an art form.
Me: I simply burn meat.
Should you do it again…
Go to the paint section of any hardware store.
Get a sanding sponge.
Not for non-stick, but for stainless cookware it’s fabulous for those various stains.
Similar to the sanding sponge, I just use a magic eraser on my burnt-on pans now. Soak them first, get the upper layers of crap off, then scrub the burnt-on stuff with the magic eraser. It seems to be working just fine.
Just tonight I once again cleaned some cookware with my 1300 psi power spray washer in the yard. You can get one at Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, etc. For about $120
Just hook up a hose and 110 volts, and blast away.
Be sure to wear safety glasses. I have had big chunks of razor sharp burnt residue fly off at great speed and distance. Also water over 1000 psi can cut you, and even kill you. Just one millisecond of distraction and you will badly injure yourself.
FYI 1300 psi power washers are used by people who restore furniture to Blast the paint off, to give you an idea of its power.