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| Before and After... these are also 17 years old by now (MANY cleanings) |
If you've been a reader of An American Housewife for a few years, then you'll know that every once in a while I do an update on my stoneware - or how I 'clean' it I should say. I've also added another brand of stoneware a few years ago so I have 3 baking stones now and they all three (3) live in my oven at all times, full time.
Yes - even when I'm not baking on them, they are still in the oven full time - mostly just hanging out on the lower racks while 'whatever' else bakes. They also sometimes do double duty as a 'drip pan' when cheese, grease or apple pie filling, etc. drips down from whatever it is I'm baking.
A well seasoned baking stone is dark brown. This is a good thing because when they are 'loved' and dark brown, they are non-stick. And even though they are cleaned by scraping them with the little plastic scrappers, and a quick hot water scrub if needed; once in a while you actually want to 'clean' them.
I got my stones in 2005. (Yes, the PC baking stones in these photos are from 2005)
By 2007 they were beautiful dark brown and seasoned well. One day in 2007 I decided spur-of-the-moment to clean the ovens and flipped the self-cleaning feature on while I was crazy-busy doing other things.
I wrote about it in an old post here: 2007 Post (https://www.housewifebarbie.com/2007/10/how-to-clean-pampered-chef-stoneware.html)
The end result was beautifully clean stoneware.
That's how they've been cleaned ever since. Literally... since 2007 (and today is March of 2022).
Since 2007, whenever I clean my oven I leave 2 or 3 of the pans in and let them get clean as well. Note it does take the 'shiny' off the metal racks when you leave them in, but if you actually use your oven and cook with it, you won't have sparkly, shiny 'new' looking racks after a little while anyway. I sometimes just put a tiny amount of WD-40 on a paper towels and lightly run it over the side of the racks to make them slide nice again.
Here is a well seasoned, well used, loved stone. This is pretty much what they all look like after awhile.
And here is what they come out of the oven looking like... ready to be brushed lightly with a towel to get remnants of ash off and then immediately ready for use again.
The 'clean' one (with a light bit of gray ash to be gently blown or brushed away) is on top and I placed a regular 'before' stone below it to show the difference of "before and after" simply letting them in the oven during a regular self-cleaning cycle.
