How to clean your oven with a dishwasher tablet

Cleaning the oven is one of those chores that many people, including myself, dread having to do. The crouching on your knees, the rigorous scrubbing required, and the fume-y aerosol oven cleaners are just a few reasons to want to put this task off for as long as possible. That’s why I was excited to test out this cleaning hack from The Kitchn that promises a way to remove baked-on grease and gunk from your oven with fume-free Finish dishwasher detergent tablets and minimal scrubbing.

To try this hack, it’s important to first put on a pair of kitchen or cleaning gloves. This is not just to protect your skin from any ingredients in the dishwasher tablets that might cause skin irritation, but also because the cleaning pods crumble as you scrub, creating a messy paste. Once your gloves are on, you’ll want to unwrap a Finish pod, dip it into some water and get ready to tackle your oven and make it look new again.

Here’s how my oven looked before I started cleaning:

Thanks to a set of oven liners I own, the bottom of the oven was not as dirty as it could have been, but the oven door was splattered with some sort of baked-on gunk (the likely culprit: lasagna sauce).

As I began moving the Finish pod back and forth over the grease built-up, I was surprised how quickly and easily everything came off. I chalk this up to the texture of a Finish dishwasher pod. Unlike cleaning pods that contain liquid solution inside a dissolvable plastic pouch, Finish tabs are made of a solid detergent and have a gritty texture that is ideal for simultaneously scrubbing and scraping off baked-on food.

When I was satisfied that all of the debris had been scrubbed away, I wiped down the oven with a damp towel to remove the remaining paste, and then spritzed my glass oven door with Windex just to make sure there wasn’t any lingering detergent residue.

Here’s how my oven looked less than 10 minutes later:

In the end, I used two Finish tablets to get my oven clean, but you may need to use more, depending on how much cleaning your oven requires. Because of how easy this hack was to do, I will reach for a Finish tab again the next time I need to clean my oven. It is definitely less dread-inducing than needing to use a scrubbing brush or a fume-producing, oven-cleaning spray.

Will you try this hack to clean your oven?