How to Clean a Toaster Oven: Tips and Tricks

Photography: Matthew Korfhage

Add the diluted vinegar to dish soap for additional degreasing: Need a wicked substance? You don’t want to use it all the time, but the vinegar helps degrease a pan or oven when simple elbow fat will not do the trick. And although it is a little harder than basic dish soap, it will not do much harm when it is reserved for occasional power.

The Steam method: Before cleaning your oven, try to heat a tray with a layer of water. As the water evaporates, steam will help relax a little gunk for easy cleaning.

Use gentle degreasers and magic mess: First try simple dish soap. But if your glass or your sides are really greased and the dish soap will not do the trick, you may need something a little stronger. But you still don’t want to use really abrasive substances. Try a softer degreaser like Krud Kutter ($ 11). Breville spokesperson were also vocal enough on their love for Mr. Clean Magic erases ($ 12) wipes.

Some not to do: Do not use whitening or ammonia, it’s hard and toxic and you eat food in this oven. Do not use steel wool or other abrasive pads. Do not use robust degreasers or night cleaners like Easy-Off, which may not be suitable for the materials of your toaster. Many Grille-Pain ovens, including Breville, have non-stick coatings for easy cleaning: you prefer not to chemically take off this non-stick coating.

How to clean the heating elements of the toaster oven

My feeling is to avoid doing it. Perform it at high, burn what you can. Avoid your heating elements as you avoid the lowered power lines. They are fragile, a thin glass of quartz glass that will break at minor pressure. And on many ovens, they are quite difficult and expensive to replace. Great this is an easy way not to have an oven, and I know it from experience.

But if you have to: Do not use cleaning agents. Do not use baking soda. Do not use anything other than the sweetest whispering of a sponge or a water cloth, run gently over the length of the heating element. Do not apply the pressure. Also make sure that the heating element is dry again before turning it back, if you wet it. These are all advice from Breville, whose heating element that I nevertheless broke while trying to be soft.

In fact, have you tried prayer?

As a last resort, accept the things you cannot change

But if you have a toaster for more than a year, no matter what you do, you will almost certainly accumulate at least a fat point or discoloration which has just become a part of your oven. Perhaps it is on aluminized steel of your breadcrumbs, now discolored definitively with a burnt butter stain. It may be splashes by heated elements. It may be this permanent dark place on the glass of your oven door, marked by beauty by something unknown.

You have tried everything, but that’s right. It’s part of your life now. Well: forgive yourself. Life sometimes appears to you. I still have a small but visible scar on my hand of a roller board accident on the aisle of my baby-sitter when I was 8 years old, and a remaining unleashing on my elbow from that moment, I was attacked in Chicago. I try to believe that it gives me character. Your oven can now have character.