The Dangerous Oven 'Hack' You Should Never Try
Cleaning your oven can be arduous and sometimes requires dangerous caustic detergents, especially if you keep putting off the chore and the dirt build-up exacerbates. In extreme cases, the oven may start smoking, and charred food residue will contaminate whatever you are baking or grilling. Some ovens include a handy self-cleaning function but bear in mind that it's a process that guzzles electricity and blasts hot air around the interior for up to three hours, turning all foreign matter into ash. We can not say that this solution has Mother Nature's best interests at hand, per Cleaning Matters.
So where does this leave us? The healthy and wise alternative would be to clean up after every time you use your oven. Alternatively, you may be tempted to try some of the cleaning hacks that appear on social media. One such 'hack' is to line the interior with tin foil, which supposedly helps food cook faster and keeps the interior of the oven clean.
The dangerous oven clean-up hack
If tinfoil works to line baking sheets and trays, it should be as effective for lining the interior of your oven, right? Wrong. Placing a sheet of foil on a shelf or at the bottom of your oven will intensify the heat, says kitchen appliance brand Whirlpool, sometimes to the point where the tinfoil melts and damages the oven's enamel coating.
Tinfoil will only melt at temperatures that exceed 1220 degrees Fahrenheit, explains Sciencing. Though it may be rare, this means that a foil lining can cause the temperature to increase by around 400 degrees, and thus, damage the oven's heating elements, warns Universal Appliance Repair.
So are there any cleaning hacks that actually work? you might ask. According to CNet, there is. And it is as simple as using a silicone oven liner specifically designed for the purpose of protecting the oven's interior against dirt.