7 Ways to Keep Your Stovetop and Countertops Grease-Free
Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders around the globe, more and more people have been regularly cooking at home.
This means that a lot of Americans have gotten a crash course on home cooking and cleaning.
Whether you’ve been an avid home-chef for years or you’ve finally mastered making pasta, there’s one thing that all cooks have to contend with: kitchen grease.
Let’s take a look at 7 ways to keep your kitchen grease free.
1. Use Your Range Hood
One of the best ways to prevent cooking grease from building up on your stove, counters, and cabinets is to use your range hood or exhaust fan. Turn it on right when you start to cook, every time.
Most range hoods have a filtration system that is designed to remove particles including grease. After filtering the air, it’s either vented outside or recirculated into the room.
2. Manage the Splatter
Sometimes, you’re simply cooking food that’s more likely to make a mess. When this is the case, there are a number of things you can do to help avoid grease and other food particles splattering.
One thing you can do is buy and use a grease splatter screen. These splatter screens are great because they still allow steam to escape from the pan but they help avoid your stovetop from getting bombarded by grease splatter. There are similar products for use in the microwave that can help avoid a mess while allowing food to still vent.
Another thing you can do is use a lid when cooking. The lid makes it so water droplets are trapped rather than released into your kitchen. When you take the lid off, though, it’s likely some splattering will still occur.
There are also products you can use called splatter shields. While this doesn’t make it so your pan splatters any less, it can make it so cleaning up is easier and more efficient.
The last thing you can do to manage the splatter is to cover the stove burners you aren’t using. An easy hack for this is to take a baking sheet and place it upside down on top of unused burners to protect them from splatter.
3. Use Your Cabinet Space
One of the most annoying things about cooking grease is the way it can build up on hard to wash objects. To avoid this happening in the first place, store these objects in your cabinet so they don’t get coated in kitchen grease.
4. Use Lower Temperatures to Cook
If you have the choice to use lower temperatures while cooking, go for it. This will help prevent splatter and make it so you have to scrub down your kitchen way less often.
A little safety tip, if you end up having an incident where a grease fire starts, never try to put it out with water. Instead, use an extinguisher, baking soda, or a fire blanket.
5. Clean Regularly
It’s pretty much always easier to clean up messes right away rather than leaving them for later. When you do find that your meal made a splattery mess, wipe it up immediately. You’ll thank yourself later!
When it comes to keeping your kitchen spotless, you really want to keep grease from ever building up. One of the things you’ll come across when you Google “how to clean a stovetop” is the nearly ubiquitous advice to clean the stove every single time you cook.
This might seem like a bit too much, but what you have to realize is that if you truly clean your stove every time you cook, it will take practically no time at all. Wipe your stove down before and after cooking and it will only take a few seconds, tops.
6. Use the Right Size Pan
One reason that you might be constantly googling “how to clean kitchen grease” is if you’re cooking with too small of a pan. Invest in a larger pot or pan so that your food has plenty of space to cook without trying to escape over the sides.
7. Don’t Wander Too Far Way
One thing that can cause a stovetop mess is pots that boil over. It’s great to be able to set something on the stove and go work on something else, but you don’t want to wander too far away. If your food starts boiling over, you can have a real gooey mess left around the burner to deal with afterward.
A Grease Free Kitchen Is a Happy Kitchen
Nothing makes a kitchen look dingier than grease build-up. Your backsplash, range hood, stovetop, cabinets, and counters can get coated in a sticky, discoloring mess. When you’re dealing with an already greased-up kitchen, there are a number of things you can use to deep clean and start over new.
One way to clean up grease is to use undiluted vinegar to get rid of the mess. FYI, though, you don’t want to use vinegar to clean countertops that are porous, like unsealed stone.
Another thing you can use is baking soda. Grab a damp sponge and sprinkle some on before wiping down the surfaces with grease on them. Afterward, use a damp cloth to help remove the residue.
Baking soda is great because it’s abrasive, but that means you should be careful with it. If you scrub too hard you could damage the finish on your countertop.
If you’re stuck with impossibly caked-on grease, the tactic of last resort is actually quite counterintuitive. You can use vegetable oil in order to help rid your kitchen of a particularly stubborn grease stain. Afterward, use one of the other methods to give your counters, stove, backsplash, and anything else that had grease on it a final wipe down.
Did you find this article about keeping your kitchen grease free interesting? If so, be sure to check out the rest of our blog for more informative and entertaining articles!
