How to clean your stove grates using ammonia

Hi friends,

Well, it is Spring cleaning time and I have been very busy taking care of some items that are not traditionally on the Spring Cleaning list but still required attention: today I tacked my stove grates!

I love cooking with a gas stove and would never trade it for any other kind. That said, they are a pain to clean and maintain. In particular those cast iron - enameled grates. For some reason, the burners themselves are never an issue and I always manage to keep them clean. The grates, however, not so much! So after some Internet (think Pinterest) research, I found this deep cleaning method using ammonia and I am sharing it with you today. Why? Because it works!

You will need:

• Medium Size Garbage bag (self tie)
• 1 cup of ammonia (I used the lemon scented)
• A glass container (for the cup of ammonia)
• A Pyrex over dish 
• A sponge with a scrubbing side
• A mix of Dawn + Vinegar in a spray bottle (click the link for the recipe)
• A pair of rubber gloves

Let's begin with the sad state of my grates before this experiment:

As you can see, they were pretty disgusting looking. Here we have a mix of baked on grease, spilled food that was burnt and pretty much fused with the enamel. Yikes!

It 's so bad, you can't even tell what color my original grates are under this caked on disaster!

Very gross!

This is what I did:

I poured one cup of ammonia inside a ramekin. I then placed a large rectangular glass dish inside a garbage bag and place the cup inside the dish. The reason why I did not place the ramekin directly inside the garbage bag was to avoid any spill.

I then placed all four grates inside the bag, on top of each other. No need to spray them or dip them in the ammonia since the fumes from the ammonia itself are doing the cleaning.

All you had to do at this point was tightly close the bag and let everything stand, as is, overnight.

In the morning, I simply re-opened the bag. Do watch for fumes from the ammonia since they do get pretty intense - I would recommend you do this in a well ventilated area. In my case I left the whole bag out on the deck and brought the grates back into the kitchen sink, one by one.

Once into the sink, I sprayed the grates with my mix of Dawn and Vinegar (my recipe)just to soften the crusted goo a bit further. I can honestly say that most of the stuff could easily be wiped off. There were some areas that required a bit of elbow grease, mainly the corners of the grates. For those, I used the scrubbing part of my sponge. And here is the result:

I am pretty sure you can tell the difference, it is that drastic!

All I can say is that ammonia is a miracle cleaner when it comes to this stuff. It's just too bad it is so toxic to skin and lungs! If you know of other uses for ammonia, please leave a comment below as I would love to learn more about it. Thank you.

Sophia, NJ.

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