The Best Way to Clean Stuck-On Food off Pans, According to a Professional Chef

There is no way to avoid it: an abundance of dirty dishes is an unavoidable part of any home-cooked holiday feast.

While the last thing anyone wants to do after braising a roast or baking dozens of gingerbread treats is deal with dirty dishes, your casserole pans and cookie sheets aren’t going to wash themselves. So, the least you can do is make the dishes as easy to clean as possible–because the only thing worse than washing dishes is scrubbing dishes with stubborn food stuck on them.

With these simple tips from Resident Chef Mark Garcia, in partnership with Finish Ultimate, you will have the perfect game plan in place to get off even the most difficult bits so you can get back to enjoying the holiday cheer as soon as possible.

The Best Tips for Cleaning Stubborn Food Residue

If only Santa’s elves could do the dishes for us during the holiday season. With tips from the pros, you luckily won’t need them to. While it might seem simple, the perfect dishwashing strategy can be more difficult to master than you might think. And who better to look to for help than culinary experts in cleaning off dirty dishes?

According to Chef Garcia, the best strategy to clean off dirty pans with stubborn residue is to start by scraping off as much as you can. “When faced with stuck-on food, be sure to scrape off as much residue as possible before loading the dishwasher,” he says. You can use several strategies to get rid of lingering stains, such as buying a scraper tool or scrubbing with a sponge. Once you have gotten off your food as best as you can, Garcia says the dishes are ready to go into the dishwasher, and your detergent will take care of the rest.

The surprising part of this tip is that pre-rinsing your dishes is only recommended if the food on your pans is very stubborn. For pans where the food is not stuck on, you can just load them in as-is—the detergent will take care of the rest. Finish further recommends that when you load your dishes into the dishwasher, you should make sure to place the items with the most stubborn of messes face down. This way, the spray arms of your machine can blast them with the highest amount of pressure possible. 

Other Cleaning Methods for Stuck-on Food

While the methods from the pros above should take care of most stuck-on messes, there are a couple of other home remedies that may help as well.

Ketchup

One surprising but effective kitchen hack that can help you get stuck on food off of pans is to pull out your ketchup. This might sound surprising, but vinegar is an essential ingredient to the beloved condiment. Vinegar is made up of acetic acid, which can break up messes like burnt food residue. Plus, most kitchens almost always have ketchup on hand, so you don’t need to worry about keeping a special product in stock. Simply slather ketchup over the stuck area, let it sit for about 30 minutes, and wipe it off before washing. For more specific information on how to use ketchup to clean your pans, check out our full article here. Spoiler alert: it works.

Baking Soda and Vinegar

If you are in search of a good dish-soaking method, try this home remedy to get rid of stubborn food residue and keep your pan in top shape. All this method calls for is baking soda, white vinegar, and lukewarm water. Plus, it is an easy way to avoid putting a lot of elbow grease into your dishwashing: All you need to do is let the dish soak for a while, and cleaning your pan will be a breeze.

Read the original article on ALLRECIPES