Ever burned a cooking pot and tried everything to get the burned food residue off of it to no avail?

A few days ago, my wife badly burned the rice and scorched a cooking pot while cooking dinner.  It looked like she had ruined the pan for good, since no amount of soaking and scrubbing would remove the black burned residue from the pot.  Mind you, this was a piece of expensive, thick stainless steel, copper-bottomed gourmet cooking ware. It would be a shame to throw it out.  And I didn’t want to scrape the stuff off the bottom and ruin the pot.

I remembered somewhere I had read that using oven cleaner would clean the pot. It wouldn’t hurt to try. The instructions said to warm the oven a little first. As this wasn’t an oven but a large saucepan, I heated the pot on low heat just slightly over the stove (not too hot or the cleaner will smoke), then sprayed the cleaner on and left the pot covered overnight.

In the morning, to my astonishment, the stubborn black crust was liquefied and wiped right off the bottom and sides of the pot with nothing more than newspaper. No scrubbing needed. It worked!

So what were the active ingredients in this stuff? I could only find mention of one ingredient – sodium hydroxide, which is lye. Lye is very strong stuff and needs to be handled with care. I normally don’t like using caustic cleaners, but in this case, it was all I could find to save the pot. It’s not to be used on exterior oven surfaces, aluminum, chrome or baked enamel, but it’s fine for porcelain, enamel, iron, stainless steel, ceramic and glass cooking ware.

A word of warning – wear gloves and don’t breath the stuff.  The cleaner was heavily perfumed, probably to mask the lye odor.  But the fragrance was overwhelming in itself.  Spray it on outside and cover the pot quickly before bringing it back indoors.