N is for No Scrub Way to Clean Burners

On one of our visits to the basement for a tornado warning this month, I noticed a jug of ammonia on a shelf (a shelf with pantry items on it, I might add). 

Me: Why do we have a bottle of ammonia?

Husband: I thought it would be good for cleaning.

Me: Cleaning WHAT?

Husband: I don't know. I thought it would be good to have.

I had no intention of using that ammonia EVER. Isn't ammonia gas one of those things that forces evacuations of towns when a railroad car full of it derails?

Now I'm having to take that back, because I did, indeed, use the ammonia. Here's the Pinterest pin that caused me to take the cap off that bottle of liquid death:

Found on thevspotblog.com

Our stove is around 20 years old. It came with the house when we bought it 17 years ago, It's a great stove, really, but the burners were already a little gunky at the time, and they have progressively gotten worse over the years. It's not that I don't clean them (we are messy cooks in our house), but that cooked-on greasy gunk is hard to get off. I usually use a combination of Soft Scrub and an SOS pad, and it's labor intensive, so when I found a pin for a no scrub way to clean stove burners, I was certainly intrigued.

According to the directions, you place the burners inside a large (gallon sized worked) plastic bag, pour in about 1/4 cup of ammonia, seal the bag, and let sit overnight. The fumes from the ammonia are supposed to do the rest. 

I only tried this on two of my burners. On the off chance the ammonia completely consumed my stove burners (because what do I know about ammonia?), I would still have two usable ones. Being able to use at least two burners on the stove is vital, since our microwave pooped out and needs to be replaced, and we are stuck USING REAL PANS to heat up leftovers and such. Then I opened the bottle of "lemon fresh" ammonia and gave it a whiff, which (a) burned all the hair out of my nose and (b) smelled like lemon scented cat pee. I poured some into the bags, zipped them up, then carried them outside and left them on the front step in case the bags leaked and we died in our sleep from the fumes.

Before. Icky.

Contrary to the name, this stuff is NOT nice.

My burners stayed inside the plastic bags with the ammonia from about 8 pm last night until 2:00 this afternoon when I got home from preschool. Leaving the bags outside overnightwas the smartest thing I've done in a long time, because the bags did, indeed, leak. My husband helped me get them in the house without dripping everywhere (by bringing me a large plastic storage bowl that I am very fond of and that I hope won't smell like cat pee now). 

Inside the kitchen, I donned some rubber gloves (the Playtex kind, yellow, which made me feel very much like my mother) and pulled the first burner out of a bag, along with a cloud of ammonia fumes. *cough cough*  The burner LOOKED pretty much the same as it did before the ammonia sauna, and I thought the process hadn't worked, but once I started working on it with a kitchen sponge, the greasy gunk washed away and the burner looked, if not like new, about 100 times better than it had before.

Scrubbing.

Scrubbing more.

(In all fairness to the pin, the product, and the procedure, these burners have had a hard, hard life, including some of the coating no longer being on there in places.) There is still a little black, burnt on crud in the intersections of the burner, but it's much better than it was before. 

Was it truly "no scrub"? Meh, not so much. I had to put a little elbow grease into it, but it wasn't horrible. 

And when my nose hairs grow back after the ammonia assault, I might try it again.

Pinterest win!