I have a new oven that has a self cleaning feature on it. Having never done that before, in 3 hours and 7 minutes it will be done. and I’m wodering what I should expect to see when I open the door? I’m curious.
Light grey ash here and there. Mop it out with a damp sponge once everything’s cool.
Sure beats Easy-Off!
Make sure a window is open and your bedroom door is closed. If you don’t run the cleaner very often, it can get stinky.
ETA: Take out the utility light, too. It get so hot in there, it will break the filaments.
No, there’s no reason to do this. The light is protected by high-temperaure glass. Also, the temperature of the filament when it is operating is WAY higher…
The self-clean cycle may be done in three hours, but you will need to wait for the oven to cool down to a reasonable temperature before it will unlock and let you open it.
Cool! Easy-Off always gives me a headache. That’s why I always had my husband do the oven.
Yeah. Found THAT out a little while ago - whooooheee I’m glad it’s nice outside - at least I know now to NEVER do this in the winter!
Glad to hear that because husband started this experiment before we read to take out the light.
Also good to know - I would have thought it was broken. And I can’t BELIEVE how it heated up the house!! How hot do those things GET anyway?
And thanks, y’all!!
The display on my oven now is reading “Cool” - I am WAY too excited about this!!
That’s what I thought, too, but every time I forget to remove the lamp, it gets burnt out.
You should be fine if you do it every couple of months. If you leave the racks in, just run some cooking oil on them, and they’ll slide in and out more easily.
Thanks, everyone - it is done! And my husband is going to vacuum out the ashes - it worked really really well!!
Unfortunately, it must have gotten really super super hot because there are some scorch marks on the oven door, but husband says they look like they can be cleaned up - maybe a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser would work. The landlady got it for us just before last Christmas and this is the first time we tried it - I just don’t want to have damaged it - but he says they’ll come off. And I trust him. Kind of.
This was far too much fun for a Thursday afternoon!!! And since I’m still working, he gets to clean the rest of it out!
Thanks for everyone’s responses - appreciate it!
so will you be making some overfilled berry pies just to dirty up the oven again?
It’s too late for the OP, but the manual for my oven says to remove the oven racks before running the cleaning cycle, because they can get discolored due to the extreme heat.
My manual says the same thing. I leave the racks in, and they did, in fact, lose their shiny luster. Thankfully no one permitted in my house gives a damn what color the oven racks are.
Yeah, the thing about removing the racks is that now I have to clean them and the whole point of this is to not clean stuff.
Aren’t there 2 types of self-cleaning ovens? I think one is catalytic, it uses a lower temperature. The other one just uses brute high temperature (at least 400C)
Wow, 400°C for three hours. I wonder how much that costs.
What I want to know is, if electric ovens can get up to 400C for the cleaning cycle, why can’t they get that hot for cooking pizza?
Because that’s too hot. 230-250°C is hot enough for pizza.
In the amount of time it would take to pre-heat to that level, you could probably have cooked it at a lower temperature already. And of course, operator error would lead to more damaging burns. How fast would skin sizzle off with a half-second of contact at that temperature?
It’s just not necessary for a consumer oven to get that hot. In a professional kitchen with trained employees, why not?
should that be an alternate method for crispy crust’?
Professional pizza ovens get up to 700F (370C) or even hotter, depending on oven type. Cite. Pizzas will cook at 250C (which is the hottest my oven goes to), but I’m sure you’d get better results with a pizza stone in a really hot oven.