How to Clean a Stove or Oven

Tackling the task of cleaning a commercial stove can be a doozy, especially if not done often enough. Our company specializes in cleaning commercial stoves for a business and specifically for restaurants, we suggest you clean the stoves daily.  Even if you can’t afford to hire someone to do it professionally on a daily basis, you need to have your staff taking care of the task as part of their nightly routine. A dirty stove can quickly create a fowl smell and can interfere with the food you are putting out as well. I would like to provide some helpful tips and tricks for cleaning your commercial stove. These are definitely labor intense so be sure you are hiring the right person for the job.

First of all, here is what you will need to get started:

1. Rubber gloves
2. Decarbonizing degreaser
3. Liquid dish soap & hot water in a bucket or industrial sink
4. Old rags
5. Stainless steel scrubbers (Steel wool)
6. Pumice stones
7. Glass cleaner

A few safety tips before we get started, ensure your stove has completely cooled prior to cleaning. The last thing you want is to burn yourself before you even have a chance to get started.  Once sure it’s not hot, you are ready to go.  Also, if you are working with a gas stove, turn the gas off. This will help to prevent a flash fire or possible explosion from your cleaning fumes.

Here are steps for proper commercial stove cleaning:

1. Put on your rubber gloves.
2. Heat the stove. It is much easier to clean the grills, burner plates, drip guards and oven racks if they are heated first.
3. Once good and hot remove the grills, burner plates, drip guards and oven racks and put in hot soapy water with decarbonizing degreaser to soak.
4. While those are soaking spray the entire surface area and inside of oven with your degreaser and wipe down with rags. Be careful to avoid the light fixtures or wiring inside the oven. For those areas that are super caked with food debris, scrub them with a pumice stone. These will remove dirt from stainless steel without scratching. If you are doing this type of work for a living, buy these regularly. They will save you money and time and they are great to use on commercial grade stoves.
5. Use a window cleaner to clean the glass window in the oven door.
6. Take grills, burner plates, drip guards and oven racks out of the soak and scrub them with steel wool. Make sure you get all of the food debris off of them. Then rinse them with cold water from the sink’s sprayer hose.
7. Final step: Put them back into place while still damp, then turn the oven to about 200 degrees for about 10 minutes so they can slowly dry. This is a timesaver so that you don’t have to wipe clean each individual item.

That’s it! If you are cleaning just one stove, this should be no big deal. But if you are in charge of cleaning more than one stove, this type of cleaning is very labor intense and time consuming. If hiring a cleaning company, be sure to hire a company that specializes in this type of commercial cleaning. They know tips and tricks of the trade and can get the job done much more efficiently. Our job is to help you create a great reputation among restaurant customers while also impressing your local health department inspector, without the fines. Even though hiring a commercial cleaning service is an added expense, I can guarantee that the benefits will far outweigh the costs.