If Your Kitchen Smells, Look Towards This Appliance

There are few kitchen experiences as unsettling as an inexplicable food odor permeating the room when you're not even cooking. You might be quick to blame your waste bin, but the first place to inspect should actually be your oven. This appliance is one of the most common yet underrated culprits of a smelly kitchen.

Two factors can make your oven rather odiferous: Food tends to bubble and splatter as it cooks inside, and it's often difficult to notice and clean the residue left behind. Letting food drip in the oven is not only dangerous but also creates lingering smells that might leak out even when the appliance is closed. Worse, those odors can seep into dishes you cook afterward, suffusing your roast potatoes or light and fluffy angel food cake with icky stale flavors. Top offenders include grease drippings from meat and charred remains of pizzas stuck to the oven racks.

You might feel skeptical about oven smells if yours has a self-cleaning mode that you run regularly, but this doesn't always provide the thorough cleaning the appliance needs. Also, self-cleaning functions use extremely high temperatures in order to burn off the residue, which frequently results in popped fuses and the need for repairs down the line. It's safer and more effective to wash the appliance by hand, which will be easier than you think with these cleaning tips for keeping your oven spotless.

If you use your oven regularly, you should deep-clean it at least once every three months. Give it an additional scrub every time you cook fatty or strong-smelling foods, like roast chicken with garlic. As for what tools to use, commercial oven cleaners make quick work of stubborn grime, but they leave strong chemical scents of their own. On the natural side, using a humble lemon is one of the best hacks for cleaning your oven and making it smell great.

To try this trick, slice up a fresh lemon, put it in a dish of water, and heat it in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The citrusy steam loosens up residue for ease of scrubbing while neutralizing nasty odors. For particularly dirty ovens, repeat this process a few times, scrubbing after each interval, until the interior looks and smells fresh. 

Another natural remedy for sticky oven floors and walls uses baking soda — a powerhouse odor eliminator — and vinegar. Mix the soda with water to form a paste, spread it onto the grimy parts of your oven, and let it sit overnight. Then, scrape the paste off and spray the areas with vinegar before wiping away to reveal shiny, odor-free surfaces. As for the grates, dryer sheets are the unexpected secret to spotless oven racks that won't stink up your kitchen. With enough effort, your oven will smell almost as good as the cookies you bake inside of it.