Everyone has burned a pan or two in his life. Someone who says that he has never dealt with cleaning a burnt pan before is probably hiding the truth. Or, he may be one of those people that hardly ever cook in their lives.
As we’ve established that only extremely lucky cooking people have never had any burnt pan accidents, we need to figure out the way to fix this common mistake without throwing ‘the victim’ of our lack of concentration away.
And actually, there’s more than one way to do that. So, without any further ado, let’s wipe the tears off our faces, roll the sleeves up and proceed to rejuvenating our poor burnt pans.
How to clean a stainless steel or cast iron burnt pan/pot
1. Use the power of steam
Place your pan on the stove (set it on high) and let it warm up.
Once you notice that the pan is quite hot (check that by dripping a couple of water drops on its surface), take it off the stove and put it under the cold running water.
This method might help you disconnect the burnt food from the pan and make it a lot easier to get rid of burn stuff with the help of a spatula and soapy sponge.
2. Try to ‘cook’ it with water
Grab your burnt pan and pour some water in it. The water should cover all burnt areas. Add some dish soap to it.
After that, place your pan on the stove and set it on high. Keep it on the stove for several minutes until the water gets quite hot and lifts up the burnt gunk.
Then, take it off the stove, get rid of water and use a wooden spoon to remove the burnt junk.
3. Soak the burnt pan
If the burnt stuff doesn’t want to come off even after you tried one of the two previous methods (or both), you need to give it some time and soak it.
Fill your damaged pan with hot water and add a generous amount of dish soap to it.
Leave it like that overnight and get it cleaned the next morning just using the 2nd method.
4. Baking soda and vinegar magic
You must have known that baking soda and vinegar may be sued to clean pretty much everything in your house.
Well, burnt stainless steel pans and pots aren’t an exception.
In order to clean one, make sure to get rid of as much food that’s stuck to its surface as you can.
Then, fill your poor pan with 1 cup of water and 1 cup of vinegar. Place it on the stove and keep it there until the liquid starts boiling.
After that, turn the stove off, remove the pan from it and add 2tbsp of baking soda to the liquid in it. Let the fizz do its thing for a minute or two, empty the pan and scrub it as you’d normally do.
Your pan should be sparkling clean by now, but if there’re any particularly stubborn burnt spots left, sprinkle them with baking soda and scrub them a little bit harder.
Voila! Your pan is as good as new and no one needs to know about your mischief.
How to clean a non-stick burnt pan (well, things happen)
Non-stick pans are great while they’re new. But, as they get older, they lose their non-stickiness. And that might lead to unfortunate food burning accidents.
However, you can’t use the first three methods described above to clean a burnt non-stick pan, as they’ll ruin its non-stick surface even more. And obviously, you can’t scrub them too hard due to the same reason.
Luckily, baking soda and vinegar method paired with gentle sponge scrub will work for your burnt non-stick pan.
If you need to get rid of the burnt oil layer on your non-stick pan, you have to fill it with room temperature water and 1/2 cup of vinegar and place it on the stove.
Finish the process by boiling the liquid to make the oil detach from the pan’s surface, pouring it along with risen burnt oil out of the pan and washing the latter using a nylon sponge.
