With summer knocking on the door and Christmas celebrations coming up now is the perfect time to plan ahead and get your BBQ sparkling clean.
Australian summers are the perfect time to crank out the BBQ and cook up an outdoor feast for friends, family and neighbours. A good clean BBQ not only cooks better, but is healthier and can help avoid food contamination as well as helping to make the food taste better. It is one of the messiest, hardest and most dreaded cleaning jobs we face and also holds the potential to be one of the most satisfying. When it’s all nice and clean in the end it feels so worthwhile.
So here’s our step by step guide to getting your BBQ beautiful and clean without too much fuss.
Some of the tools you will need include;
- Large Bucket with hot soapy water
- Scrubbing Pad and/or steel wool
- Hard wire brush with a long handle
- Heavy duty cleaning gloves
- A few old cleaning rags
- Possibly a vacuum cleaner
- A full belly to give you plenty of elbow grease
Step 1 – Remove any excess food residue
This will have collected on BBQ plates and may have also gathered in the bottom tray, so remove these scraps before step 2. If its not too greasy you can get your vacuum cleaner to help you here and if you have a hand held vac, even better.
Step 2 – Degreasing
The key to degreasing is to turn the BBQ on to its highest temperature for around 5 minutes to burn off excess grease and then leave it to cool before wiping off excess grease with an old throwaway rag.
Step 3 – Soak the BBQ Grill
Put the grill grates into a hot mixture of soapy detergent and warm water for around 15 minutes to help soften the fats and sticky marinades etc before scrubbing hard with a wire brush. If it’s particularly filthy you may need to repeat this process with a fresh new bucket of water and do a second clean if you find the first one doesn’t quite hit the mark.
Step 4 – Scrub everything down
Once well soaked get the brush and scrub the excess fats and gunk away and for the fine tuning use steel wool and/or a scourer sponge. Be careful if your grates are porcelain as too harsh a brush can damage them. You may have to focus on the corners which will be the hardest part to get really clean.
Step 5 – Final wash
Once you’ve got everything as clean as you can start again with clean water and do a quick final clean of everything. Use clean cloths and a non-toxic cleaning product on the exterior. Microfibre cloths work best.
It’s a great idea to do this big clean twice a year; once heading into summer and once again at the end of summer before winter sees the BBQ action diminish.
Happy BBQing and have a good weekend.
Michael Sweet is the founder of 1800 CLEANER and has over 30 years of cleaning experience.
