We tested Bar Keepers Friend against baking soda for cleaning tough stains and found that it’s more effective on the worst ones. For lighter stains, though, we didn’t see much of a difference between the two substances.
Even seasoned cooks can scorch a pan, whether they’re searing meat at high temperatures or fiddling with a delicate sauce. But if you have the right gear, cleaning those tough stains isn’t as much of a pain as it might seem. Based on our years of experience cooking at home and in professional kitchens, here are the techniques we use to keep our cookware gleaming.
Spatula or paper towels: Use a spatula or paper towels to get rid of excess oil.
Dish brush: We like to use a long-handled dish brush, such as the OXO Good Grips Dish Brush, to loosen any bits of stuck-on food.
Scouring pad or sponge: A fresh Scotch-Brite scouring pad or sponge is the most effective tool for removing stains. A softer Dobie pad requires more effort but leaves fewer scratches.
Bar Keepers Friend or baking soda: These powdered cleaners can scrub off stains without damaging pans. Bar Keepers Friend is more effective at scrubbing the toughest stains, but baking soda is more versatile.
Cleaning gloves: If you opt for Bar Keepers Friend or baking soda, be sure to use gloves to keep it off your hands. Lesley Stockton, a senior staff writer on Wirecutter’s kitchen team, likes Glam-Gloves Dishwashing Gloves, or you can opt for a latex-free pair such as Clorox Ultra Comfort Gloves.
Towel or oven mitts: You need to clean your pan while it’s hot, so protect your hands with a towel or an oven mitt.
Toothpicks: Inside the nooks and crannies of a pan’s rivets, you can use a toothpick to pry off gunk.
A large pot, such as a stock pot or roasting pan: If you want to boil your scorched pans in water and baking soda to remove years of grime, you need a vessel large enough to hold them. We recommend a big stock pot or a roasting pan.
For discoloration, like blue or rainbow coloring, wipe the pan with a sponge or soft cloth and white vinegar. For cloudy white hard water spots, remove by boiling a 1:1 white vinegar to water solution. For burnt food, sprinkle the surface generously with baking soda, add water and bring to a boil.
How long will this take to clean?
To clean most pans after cooking in them, you’re likely to need less than five minutes to wipe them out, scrub them down, and dry them off.
But removing tough stains can take longer. Whether you’re using elbow grease and Bar Keepers Friend to scrub or boiling baking soda and water in your pans, the process can take 15 to 30 minutes or even more. In some cases, you may want to leave a baking-soda slurry on stains overnight before washing it off the next day.
To clean a pan that you’ve just used, first scrape out excess oil with a spatula or wipe it out with a paper towel. Then deglaze the pan by adding some hot water. Cleaning a hot pan is easier, and adding hot water won’t damage it. But always let your pan cool down before fully submerging it in cool water. Otherwise the sudden change in temperature (called thermal shock) can cause a still-hot pan to warp.
You can loosen any fond (the browned bits of food) with a long-handled dish brush; we like the OXO Good Grips Dish Brush, which we’ve used in our test kitchen for years.
Grab a green Scotch-Brite scouring pad or sponge, along with some dish soap, and scrub the inside and outside of the pan, using a continuous circular motion. A Scotch-Brite pad will lightly scratch the surface of the pan. But as long as you avoid harsh pads (such as steel wool), scrubbing won’t affect your cookware’s performance or lifespan. A softer sponge, such as a Dobie pad, won’t leave scratches, but using one requires more elbow grease. And it won’t save your cookware from getting marked up by metal cooking utensils anyway.
Rinse and then dry with a clean, absorbent towel.
For tougher stains: Powdered cleaners
If dish soap and scrubbing aren’t cutting it to remove cooked-on oil or burnt food, you have two options: a baking-soda slurry or Bar Keepers Friend. They operate in similar ways, but here are the key differences we found when testing.
Baking soda: When we tested baking soda and Bar Keepers Friend side by side, we found baking soda to be a decent replacement for the powdered cleaner. For some stains, the differences between the two methods were tiny. For tougher stains, you’ll probably have to scrub more with baking soda, and it doesn’t quite get the pan back to that sparkling, like-new silver hue. But baking soda is worth trying first, since you probably already have it in your kitchen. If you decide to try baking soda, let the mixture sit for a few minutes, and then scrub it off with a scouring pad—preferably a new one with a fresh, unworn scrubby side. We like using gloves while scrubbing too, since baking soda can dry out your hands. If the stains won’t come off, you can repeat these steps and let the paste sit for longer (even overnight) or move on to Bar Keepers Friend or other, more intensive methods.
Bar Keepers Friend: If you really want to get your pan back to that silver shine and remove all the patina, the discoloring that naturally happens over time, BKF (as some folks affectionately call it) is where it’s at. During our testing, scrubbing off the toughest stains with Bar Keepers Friend took less effort than doing so with baking soda. BKF left our pans a shiny like-new silver color, while the baking soda left a barely-there copper sheen.
Bar Keepers Friend isn’t meant to sit on a pan for extended periods of time the same way baking soda can—the maker recommends wiping BKF off after a minute to avoid discoloring your cookware—but in practice we often scrubbed for longer than a minute, and we didn’t see any discoloring (possibly because we were using high-quality cookware). BKF recommends waiting for surfaces to cool before use, so heating it up is probably not a great idea—and that means you cannot swap out baking soda for Bar Keepers Friend in the methods we recommend below for particularly old and stubborn stains (seriously, please don’t).
The Ultimate Guide to Cleaning All-Clad Stainless Steel Pans
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