I Tried This "Brilliant" (and Totally Free!) Trick for Cleaning My Burnt Dutch Oven, and It Saved Me So Much Time
One of my favorite things about the weather getting cooler is how often I get to use my Dutch ovens. I have a huge one that was a wedding present and a slightly smaller one that I added to my collection later. Nothing braises stews or melds the flavors of a soup quite like a Dutch oven, which distributes heat evenly and does a pretty good job of keeping foods from burning. But not always!
I've burnt food in my Dutch oven more than once, and it's a pain to get it cleaned up. Anticipating that it would happen again, I recently decided to try America's Test Kitchen's brilliant burnt Dutch oven cleaning trick. It's the best kind of hack because it's nearly hands-off, and doesn't use any special products.
I've burnt food in my Dutch oven more than once, and it's a pain to get it cleaned up. Anticipating that it would happen again, I recently decided to try America's Test Kitchen's brilliant burnt Dutch oven cleaning trick. It's the best kind of hack because it's nearly hands-off, and doesn't use any special products.
To test the method out, I burned some food in the Dutch oven (on purpose). I put a bit of leftover finely diced onions and bell peppers in the Dutch oven along with some oil, flour, and sugar, which I knew would scorch and really put the method to the test!
So, did it work? The boiling water did a great job of loosening and dislodging some of the mess, and the wooden spoon easily scraped up a good portion of it. But, unfortunately, there wasn't any further flaking, even after I let the Dutch oven dry. I repeated the boil and scrape process again, and got a bit more up, but a stubborn portion of the burnt sugar remained on the bottom of the Dutch oven.
At this point, I decided to use some Bar Keepers Friend and elbow grease, but even that didn't get all the burnt residue off. I added some water to the Dutch oven and let it soak overnight - the next morning, my husband scoured the rest of the residue off.
My takeaway is this: I think I was a bit overzealous in creating my "burnt residue" for my little experiment; burnt sugar is notoriously difficult to remove! (And, honestly, the hack made a big dent even with my unrealistic concoction.) The burnt Dutch oven hack clearly is effective, and is easy to do while cleaning up the rest of the kitchen - just not with burnt sugar. It's the best kind of time- and energy-saving tip, and I'm definitely going to be putting it to good use often.