The Lemon Fool

I have, infuriatingly, burned the base pan in a treasured stainless steel steamer set. You know how it is, there is always one pan or set of pans which are 'just the right size' and work just right for your needs and this set is it!

I was steaming some veg today and the liquid in the base pan evaporated off at great speed (perhaps the lid at the top of the stack wasn't placed correctly and was letting too much steam out) and then there was a smell of burning and though I got to it as fast as I could I can see it will be a problem to clean. Nothing was being cooked in the base pan but the boiling water in there will have contained some run-off from the item being cooked above i.e. sprouting broccoli.

The web offers umpteen ways of cleaning a burnt pan but I'm reluctant to try them at random. I really want to save this pan. Any recommendations from personal experience?

Lynn

Steel wool, then a green Scotchbright scourer pad to polish it. Scotchbright is what we used in a factory making stainless shop equipment. Its very tough stuff scouring it wont harm it. Did the same thing myself a couple of weeks ago.

Sounds like an ideal job for Astonish paste to me .
Its always a stand by for me and always use it on our old stainless steel sink . Use with a scouring pad if necessary . Sold in most discount stores .

http://www.staples.co.uk/all-purpose-cl ... lsrc=aw.ds

Yes indeed stainless steel is tough stuff and all you need to do is use a steel scourer. I have done this many times with our 20 year old John Lewis stainless steel pans and use these type of things

http://www.spontex.co.uk/product/tough-scourers/

It's not as if you have a mirror surface to protect inside your pans.

John

30 or 25 years ago, while working in N’Orleans, I learned a trick for cleaning the inside of burned glass coffee pots. I found that a few pellets of potassium hydroxide along with a milliliter or two of water would dissolve the residue. Actually, most any caustic chemical seems to work. With that idea, I found that the cheap spray oven cleaner will also work to remove the smoke residue from my smoke cookers.


Since you may not have caustic soda or oven cleaner (which is mostly sodium hydroxide) on hand, I would try a fairly strong solution of washing soda (sodium carbonate, Na2CO3). If you don’t have that on hand, it can be made from baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3) by heating the bicarbonate in an oven at around 100 degrees C for around an hour (See; http://chemistry.about.com/od/makechemi ... g-Soda.htm ). I would heat the solution in the pan for a few minutes, dump it out and rinse with water. You may also then heat some vinegar in the pan to remove any hard water scale that formed when the water evaporated. Between the caustic and acid washes, hopefully, the pan will be cleaned or at least the stuff loosened enough that steel wool can easily finish the job.


C.J.V. - retired chemist and petroleum engineer, me

I would not use steel wool or any other seriously abraisive material. I go the oven cleaner route as suggested by C.J.V. Scouring the stainles steel roughens the surface making the pan prone to sticking, more difficult to clean and burning easier next time. Been there, done that!

John

No it doesnt. This from the Chief Engineer of a Stainless Steel fabrication Company. Scotchbright pads used by every skilled polisher in our polishing shop. Shopfronts in Knightsbridge, the checkouts in your supermarket, kitchens in posh restaurants etc etc.Gives a nice satin finish and removes the same,sort of dark grey discolourisation you find on welded edges found in your overheated pan.

midnightcatprowl wrote:The web offers umpteen ways of cleaning a burnt pan but I'm reluctant to try them at random. I really want to save this pan. Any recommendations from personal experience?

We burnt some baked beans to the bottom of a pot at the weekend. A black mark against our name, and pan, if we didn't get it clean. Very salty water, boiled, loosened it off nicely.

Ian

Thanks all. Emboldened by your suggestions (and after soaking the pan in water overnight) I gave it an initial scrub with the only scourer type thing I had to hand which was a 'loofah' type scourer and to my surprise that did the trick though I may try the vinegar idea to remove the water marking. I was lucky and got the pan off the heat quite quickly after it started to burn. I've noted the other ideas for the next pan disaster.

cicero wrote:No it doesnt. This from the Chief Engineer of a Stainless Steel fabrication Company. Scotchbright pads used by every skilled polisher in our polishing shop. Shopfronts in Knightsbridge, the checkouts in your supermarket, kitchens in posh restaurants etc etc.Gives a nice satin finish and removes the same,sort of dark grey discolourisation you find on welded edges found in your overheated pan.

Agreed, but the thread was about steel wool, not scotchbright which is used often enough in our house.

John.

Ex kitchen boy and executive chef world wide, retired.

I looked on the web recently. The safest advice seemed to be:

(1). Soak overnight.

(2). Clean with Ciff.

(3). Clean with washing up liquid.

(4). Rinse.

It worked for me.