Harness the power of steam after every cook as part of your oven maintenance
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Cooking with your oven should be a simple and enjoyable experience – no battling with difficult control panels, dealing with uneven cooking and burnt spots, or stubborn grease buildup.
Whether you’re baking sweet treats, making a Sunday roast or rolling up your sleeves to get it sparkling clean, knowing how to get the most out of your oven will help to make cooking and cleaning a breeze.
Our kitchen experts have tested the latest innovations in oven technology and share their tips and tricks to help you get the best results from this essential kitchen appliance.
1. Preheating your oven is important
Sounds pretty self explanatory, but how many times have you turned on your oven and whacked your food in before it’s been given a chance to preheat?
It’s a simple step but it’s essential in getting the best results. Preheating allows your oven to reach the correct temperature before food goes in, giving it the best chance to cook evenly.
If you bypass this step you might find your food takes longer to cook and could cook unevenly, leaving you with burnt edges and undercooked centres.
Hack tested: Using the grill to preheat
If you don’t like waiting for your oven to preheat, try turning on the grill for a few minutes first, before switching over to conventional oven mode. The idea behind this hack is that the grill jump-starts the heating process so the preheating process is faster.
When we gave this hack a whirl, the grill heated the oven interior to 190°C in just under four minutes – half the usual time. Models do vary, so it’s worth experimenting.
2. Keep the door closed during cooking
Ever heard the phrase “a watched pot never boils”? It’s the idea that the more you anxiously wait for something to happen, the longer it seems to take. The same idea applies to using your oven.
As tempting as it may seem to constantly check your food during cooking, you’ll get the best results if you keep the door closed.
Each time you open the oven door, heat escapes and the temperature inside can drop significantly (depending on how long the door stays open). This can have a detrimental effect on certain baked dishes that rely on constant heat, and it will generally slow the cooking process.
CHOICE kitchen expert Chantelle Dart says “if your oven has a good internal light you can view cooking progress through the window, rather than constantly opening the door”.
“Keeping the glass clean will also go a long way to improving visibility through the door,” she adds.
Not many people look forward to oven-cleaning time. But Chantelle suggests a little ongoing maintenance goes a long way and can help you ditch harsh cleaning chemicals, too.
“Get into the habit of wiping down your oven surfaces after each use, once it’s cooled. This will keep the grease and grime at bay, so there’ll be no need for toxic, highly caustic cleaning solutions,” she says.
“Placing a bowl of steamy hot water in the oven while it’s still warm after cooking will loosen the grime and do most of the cleaning for you. A good-quality, fibre-tech cloth designed to remove grease will do the rest.
”If there are crumbs in your oven after cooking (especially if you have an oven with air frying function), or lots of ash after a pyrolytic clean, try using your vacuum cleaner with the crevice tool attached (but only once your oven has thoroughly cooled down, of course).
4. De-grease grills and oven racks
Grill trays and oven racks can get pretty grubby, and cleaning these large and bulky accessories in a domestic kitchen sink can be a messy and awkward experience.
For a minimal-fuss solution, Chantelle suggests soaking them in a laundry tub with hot water and an enzyme-based detergent for a few hours, or even overnight.
“The enzymes in the detergent ‘eat away’ the built-up grease and food that’s burnt onto the grills,” she says.
“It almost just wipes off with a sponge. Visit our laundry detergent review and choose one of the products our experts recommend that has enzymes in it.”
If you have a large 90cm oven and your racks don’t fit in your laundry tub, use your bath instead.
5. You dont need an ‘air-fry’ function to air fry
Air fryers are the game changing kitchen appliance that keeps on giving. It’s become such a must-have appliance that manufacturers are now adding the functionality into all sorts of kitchen appliances.
Ovens are essentially air fryers on a larger scale, but manufacturers are still adding “air-fry” functions to their latest releases and almost all the new ovens that come through the CHOICE labs now have this feature.
But the truth is, if you love to air fry, you don’t need a dedicated function in your oven to achieve the same results.
Chantelle says: “if your oven has a fan-grill setting, using that will give you a similar result to using an oven that has a dedicated air fry mode”.
Sweet potato chips cooked on stacked cooling racks.
6. Make stacks of snacks
For a bigger cooking yield when making homemade chips, Chantelle suggests stacking oven-safe cooling racks on top of your oven trays to create more surface area.
“Stack cooling racks, each layered with food,” she says. “You’ll get bowlfuls for the whole family and not just a handful to fight over.”
We sliced sweet potatoes with a mandoline for even, thin rounds, then coated them with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt. Once we’d layered everything up (baking paper will prevent sticking), we baked our chips at 100°C fan-forced for two hours, turning once.
If you’ve got a loaf that’s past its best, here’s how to revive it in a flash.
Lightly dampen it, then pop it into a warm oven (about 150°C), straight on the rack, for roughly five minutes. The water will turn to steam and help rehydrate the bread, while also firming up the crust.
We tried this hack on a rather sad sourdough, and found it came back to life beautifully.
You can use a dishwasher tablet to clean your oven door, but it’s not without drawbacks.
8. Get your glass door gleaming
Glass oven doors get smashed with all sorts of grime. Your best bet is to wipe it down after every use, but if you’ve left the grime to build up, it’s likely more elbow grease is needed to get it back to pristine condition.
While an oven cleaner is the obvious choice for this task, many people don’t like the strong chemical fumes these products give off.
If you’re looking for a more natural way to clean, Chantelle suggests creating a paste with bicarb soda and water (and sometimes a dash of white vinegar) and applying it to the glass for up to 30 minutes before scrubbing with a non-abraisive sponge.
“The combination of these ingredients will go a long way to help lift stubborn grease,” she says.
Hack tested: Using a dishwasher tablet
Using a dishwasher tablet to cut through your oven door’s baked-on grease is one of the latest viral cleaning hacks. Dishwashing tablets are incredibly alkaline – which allows them to eat through grease – but they’re not quite as alkaline as oven cleaner and if there’s grit on the glass, you risk scratching it.
But a dishwashing tablet does have the advantage of not being an aerosol, which means you won’t inhale any oven-cleaning fumes. So provided you wear gloves, it probably won’t hurt. Keep in mind that it will almost certainly be less effective than a proper oven cleaner though.
We were pleasantly surprised by the results when we gave this hack a go
We were pleasantly surprised by the results when we gave this hack a go. First, snap on some rubber gloves. Then, dip a powder-based tablet into warm water and rub it across the interior pane. Keep dipping and rubbing until the tablet has fully dissolved (don’t be alarmed by the brown sludge that forms). Use kitchen paper or a microfibre cloth to remove the residue. Repeat until your glass is sparkling.
In many cases, the oven door or glass can also be removed for cleaning, which can be helpful. However, some are easier to remove and replace than others.
Love crispy fried foods but hate all the oil? CHOICE home economist Fiona Mair suggests turning your oven into a supersized airfryer – as long as it has a fan-forced setting.
“Use a cake rack or place food directly on the oven shelf to cook crumbed foods – just use an oil spray first for golden browning,” she says.
“This method reduces the amount of oil used and allows heat to circulate the food, so there’s no need to turn it during cooking.”
Proving dough with a below-bench oven.
10. Use your oven to prove your dough
As any bread baker will tell you, “proving” – when the fermentation action of yeast causes the dough to rise – is a vital part of the baking process.
For a successful prove, yeast needs a warm, humid environment – experts suggest 24–32°C.
If your oven doesn’t offer this temperature, try Fiona’s workaround for stand-alone ovens or wall ovens that sit below a benchtop: “Turn your oven on the lowest possible temperature, leave the door ajar and place the bowl of covered dough above the door,” she says.
You could also try popping your container of dough on the middle rack of your (cold) oven, then putting a half-filled loaf tin of boiling water at the bottom. Keep the door closed – and let the warmth and steam work their magic.
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Rebecca Ciaramidaro is a Content producer in the Household team at CHOICE. Rebecca writes about a wide range of children's and household products, ranging from cots and strollers to ovens, BBQs, espresso machines and electric blankets. And also grocery items such as nappies, sanitary pads and laundry detergents.
Previously at CHOICE, Rebecca worked as a Test officer in the kitchen lab.
Rebecca has a Bachelor of Science (Nutrition and Food) from the University of Western Sydney.
Find Rebecca on LinkedIn.
Rebecca Ciaramidaro is a Content producer in the Household team at CHOICE. Rebecca writes about a wide range of children's and household products, ranging from cots and strollers to ovens, BBQs, espresso machines and electric blankets. And also grocery items such as nappies, sanitary pads and laundry detergents.
Previously at CHOICE, Rebecca worked as a Test officer in the kitchen lab.
Rebecca has a Bachelor of Science (Nutrition and Food) from the University of Western Sydney.
Find Rebecca on LinkedIn.
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