.Most Cleaners Agree – kitchens and bathrooms are the worst for cleaning.
Not surprising since these rooms are the highest traffic areas and were both built for the specific purpose of making a mess.
Cleaning Strategy
The general strategy for keeping a kitchen clean is to clean up behind yourself as much as possible, as soon as possible, and – on occasion, do a deep cleaning to revitalize and refresh the kitchen area.
While many people don’t mind, and do a great job at daily cleanup of their kitchen, few enjoy the drudgery of a kitchen deep cleaning, this is where a cleaning service makes sense. Why spend one of your few days off, tearing down, deep cleaning, and resetting your kitchen?
In this article, we’ll first cover some simple, time-tested ways to keep your kitchen its cleanest with the least effort on a daily basis. We’ll then cover the general workflow for deep-cleaning your kitchen, which, depending on use, may be at 3-mos, 6-mos, or even annual intervals.
Let’s get started!
Regular Kitchen Cleaning
By regular, we mean the general kitchen cleaning duties you do every day. These have been learned through parental training, work experience, reading, and web research. If you have any great tips or tricks yourself, we would love to hear them; please jot them down in the comments below to share with others.
The Nature of Kitchen Grime
When you heat grease or oil, it vaporizes, just as the human body sweats to release heat – only it’s not water being released into the air, it’s grease.
When warm air collides with a cool surface, its moisture condenses, and even at room temperature, the condensation evaporates into the atmosphere. Not so with oil and grease; it too becomes condensation, but at room temperature, grease cannot evaporate and instead remains oil and grease everywhere it lands in the kitchen and throughout the house.
This oil and grease landing on everything has a magnetic attraction for dust and particles travelling through the air, resulting in grease and dirt build-up. It can also aid in mold build, which can be very dangerous.
Minimizing Kitchen Grease Buildup
While grease in the kitchen can’t be avoided, it can be minimized and efficiently cleaned so that your kitchen will remain as clean as practical.
- The first step is to provide good ventilation. Always have the range hood on when cooking.
- If there is a window in the kitchen, open it, and opening a door or window on the opposite side of the house will create a draft that carries the greasy air out the window. The window and frame may get grease build-up, but this is much easier to clean than total kitchen contamination.
- Choose an oil with a high smoke point, such as all-purpose vegetable oil.
- If you have a fine splash screen, place it over your pan while frying to minimize splatter.
- Dry your food off as much as possible before adding it to hot oil to minimize splash. This also saves power. Letting your food stand at room temperature for a few minutes before frying may help to fry more evenly and reduce cooking time, saving power as well.
- Wipe down anywhere you notice condensation build up while you are frying. That may be steam, but it’s more likely grease.
Although the above tips may help minimize the rate of grease build-up in the kitchen, it can’t be avoided. The easiest time to remove grease build-up is immediately, or as soon as possible after cooking when it is still warm, it tends to thicken and become tougher to remove as it stands, eventually blackening and becoming a magnetic attraction to further buildup.
Kitchen grease should be wiped clean with a hot, soapy rag or sponge immediately after cooking is complete whenever deep-frying or otherwise cooking in oil. Pay special attention to above the fry area. If your range hood has grease filters, running them through the dishwasher may be the easiest way to keep them clean (check with the manufacturer of your range hood to ensure the filters are dishwasher safe).
With a regular wipe-down after cooking with dish soap, warm water, and 5% bleach, your kitchen should pass any inspection and depending on your volume and style of cooking it may be anywhere from 6 months to a year before needing a deep cleaning.
Deep Cleaning Kitchens
If you have the time and are up to the challenge, the instructions below detail the general workflow of a kitchen deep cleaning. Apart from the dishes, this is the same workflow used for a move-in or move-out cleaning.
If you have better things to do on your days off, this is a great time to call a cleaning service like Pink’nClean. They bring their own equipment and specialty cleaners, they are usually much more efficient, and they leave no mess to clean when done. At a very reasonable price.
Note: Natural ingredients are not necessarily safer than synthetic chemicals. Natural ingredients may be allergens, and under regulations, fragrance ingredients don’t need to be disclosed, even though some can be irritants.
The Right Stuff – Choosing Your Cleaners
While a simple mixture of dish soap and water is adequate for daily cleanup, wiping down countertops, and tackling grease-smudged cabinets, dirtier jobs require heavy-duty cleaners.
- Abrasive Cleaners: No kitchen should be without an abrasive cleaner like Comet or Bon Ami. These have the scrubbing power you need and a bleaching agent to brighten up your work. The Pink Stuff is an abrasive cleaner that uses quartz as the abrasive agent. This is one of Amazon’s best-selling all-purpose cleaners, also sold at Home Depot and Walmart. According to Consumer Reports, The Pink Stuff acts as liquid sandpaper, best for hard surfaces like tiles, tubs, and sinks.
Note: Abrasive cleaners (including The Pink Stuff) can scratch the shiny finishes of glass and stainless steel kitchen appliances. Use with caution.
- Oven Cleaner: you will find many articles on safer alternatives to commercial oven cleaners, but without throwing caution to the wind, as professional cleaners, we demand the most effective cleaners for the best job in the least amount of time, so we use a spray-on foam oven cleaner. These all take time to emulsify the grease, so this should normally be your first step into a kitchen deep cleaning.
- Grease Cutters: Spray cleaners are the most effective grease-cutting agents, spray foam or pump action. While we don’t want to promote specific brands, look for a product that specifically states that it is a degreaser or has degreasing action. These products are the most effective time savers for cleaning grease buildup.
- Antibacterial Cleaners: here again, you can use a mild detergent and water with 10% laundry bleach added, but the most efficient and effective cleaners we have found are spray cleaners, either foam or pump action. This is your best line of defence against bacterial agents and microorganisms lurking in the deep crevices.
- Bleach: this is the most recommended and often used antibacterial agent used in all commercial kitchens. Health inspectors insist on it, and pools are safer to swim in because of it, so you can be sure you are safe using bleach.
- Window Cleaner: these are great for light cleaning and polishing and work very well not only on windows but stainless steel appliances as well.
- Dish Soap: we use Green Soap for almost everything that requires general cleanup. This is safe, and generally sold as dish soap (i.e. Palmolive), or as we get it, in industrial capacities for institutional use. We have found Green Soap to be the safest, most powerful general-purpose soap and have never experienced an allergenic reaction to it.
Apart from your cleaners, you will need a pail, rags or sponges, and 2-4 hours of time. The specifics of oven and floor cleaning are covered in other posts, here we focus on the overall kitchen cleaning process.
Kitchen Deep Cleaning Workflow
Without exaggeration, we have done hundreds of kitchen deep cleans, which are seldom a “wonderful experience.” Still, along the way, we’ve developed an efficient workflow for managing the job most efficiently.
Although kitchen deep cleans are much easier if done regularly, it has been our experience that they occur most often at move-in and move-out, where the kitchen must look immaculate.
- Ovens: if the oven needs cleaning, this is the place to start, as oven cleaners generally take 2 hours to do their job. While the oven cleaner works, we can be busy cleaning the kitchen.
- Remove the racks, and after spraying them with oven cleaner, they can be set aside or even outside, but place a garbage bag over them after spraying to prevent the cleaner from evaporating.
- With a damp rag or sponge, wipe down the oven to remove as much of the crustation as possible. It is safe to wipe everywhere, including the elements (with care), as long as the oven is not on.
- Spray oven cleaner over the entire oven surface, spraying a lighter coat in relatively clean areas and concentrating more cleaner on heavier soiled areas like the bottom. Don’t forget the door and its surrounding edges. This stuff doesn’t have a pleasant smell, but once coated, shut the oven door to let the oven cleaner work.
- Windows: we’ll be polishing the glass as a last step, but to start, we want to check the curtains or blinds to see if they need cleaning. These can also be cleaning while we are working, so curtains should be run through the laundry, and blinds can be cleaned in the bathtub with Pine-Sol or another general purpose home cleaner. Letting them soak a while will make them much easier to clean.
If dishes need doing, counters need cleaning, and waste needs disposal, this is a good first step. We’ll be using the kitchen sink for most of the cleaning and cleaning the sink itself as a last step to a clean kitchen (except for floors and windows). We want to create a work area that is as clear as possible. - Kitchen Cupboards: If it is a move-in/out cleaning, the cupboards should be empty. If not, then the contents of the cupboards may be greasy and need cleaning. If so, the dishes can be placed into the sink and washed while the cupboards are cleaned.
Normally, soap and water with 5% bleach work great for kitchen cabinets. Cabinet faces are notorious for picking up grease, so these may require a degreaser, which is less likely if you perform regular cleaning while cooking.
- Appliances: apart from the stove, kitchen appliances such as fridges and microwaves get pretty much the same cleaning as kitchen cabinets. A lemon-scented cleaner works well here, and don’t forget a box of baking soda in the refrigerator after cleaning to eliminate odours.
- Stove: by this time, the stove and the racks should have had enough time soaking to be wiped clean. If this is inadequate, please refer to our article on stove cleaning for a more detailed explanation.
- Windows: this is a good time to use a good window cleaner to clean the windows. If the areas around the window are greasy, they should first be cleaned with soap and water or, in worse cases, with a degreasing agent.
- Counter Tops: Depending on the surface and level of grime, you may need an abrasive cleaner or even a scraper to get down to the bare counter in some places. Use whatever you need while being as gentle as possible to clean your countertops. Don’t forget to wipe right around the underside of the edges.
- Garbage: kitchen garbage cans are notorious for germ contamination, and once the garbage has been emptied, the best cleaning method is often to take them outside, wash them in Pine-Sol, rinse them down with a hose, and wipe them off. They can be sprayed with an antibacterial agent as a last step for a final sanitization.
- Sinks: sinks should be the last items cleaned since you have been using them to clean everything else. We use a steam cleaner for sinks, as we do for much of the work just described, but apart from that, SOS pads work great for cleaning stainless steel sinks. Don’t forget to clean around the taps and fixtures. A final spraying of window cleaner on the metal fixtures does wonders for making them shine.
Kitchen Clean – Job Completed
Once the curtains or blinds have been replaced, apart from the floors, your kitchen should be in immaculate condition. For floors, check out our post on floor cleaning.
If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is, and it’s why many choose to call in a professional cleaner to get the job done. It’s up to you, but before deciding, you may wish to get a free, no-obligation estimate on having it done for you.