Aside from your kitchen floor, the pizza oven is another place that gets stained and spilled easily. Cleaning stains off the pizza oven can be challenging, especially stains left over a long period.
And, if you’ve got a wood-fired pizza oven, you’d agree with me that it’s even harder to clean since you have to clean out the ashes after cooking. The stains and ashes must be cleaned and removed daily to maintain your commercial pizza oven’s operation and health.
While cleaning a commercial pizza oven might seem like an easy peasy lemon squeeze task, trust me when I say it isn’t, at all. Fortunately, we’ll be discussing important steps to follow when cleaning your pizza ovens, including a stainless steel pizza oven and a brick pizza oven.
Tips on How to Clean a Commercial Pizza Oven
Keeping your pizza oven clean is vital to its overall performance and ensures your food taste and smell great. A dirty oven is one of the underlying causes of nasty, strange-tasting pizza.
To reiterate, your pizza determines the quality of the food; therefore, it’s only reasonable to follow the appropriate cleaning practice for the best result possible.
Here are some of these practices to adopt for the desirable result:
Select the Right Cleaning Tools
Before embarking on cleaning your pizza oven, the first step is to gather the right tools, which will help reach every nook and cranny, protect your skin, and disinfect the pizza oven.
These are the must-have cleaning tools for your commercial oven:
- Large brass wire brush
- Copper wire brush (half-moon shaped)
- Vinegar
- Shovel
- Some Towels
- Simple soapy water
- Piece of cloth
Schedule Daily Oven Cleanings
Industrial kitchens are, no doubt, very busy. So they skip cleaning the commercial oven, thinking it’s the best way to trim time. Sadly, this negligence, over time, can potentially cause problems.
Therefore, you should commit to cleaning the interior of your industrial oven at least once a day and designate certain cleaning times that must be followed through by your staff. However, we recommend that you schedule the daily cleanings for evenings, allowing you to leave the doors open overnight.
Control the Crumbs
Crumbs accumulate faster in a commercial oven than in your home, a standard pizza oven. Sadly, if not cleaned over time will cause huge problems such as causing fires and smoke and impacting the food’s flavor. To avert this, it’s important to remove all food debris from your commercial pizza oven’s inner parts.
Remove the Racks
Food debris accumulates in several areas of the pizza oven, including the oven racks. Also, it’s vital that you remove the racks and dunk them in soapy water. However, for stubborn, grime-baked-on foods, you might have to use a wire brush or scouring pad.
Clean the Doors and Walls
This is the next thing to do after removing the racks. Here, you take a damp towel to wipe down the interior and inner side of the oven doors. If your oven is well maintained, then the warm water should be more than enough.
On the other hand, you might require an oven cleaner to make cleaning easier for those who haven’t cleaned their pizza oven for a while now. More importantly, ensure it’s thoroughly wiped down and remove any debris around the fans for better airflow, and thus, maximum efficiency.
If warm water doesn’t do the job to your satisfaction, you should go for a commercial oven cleaner. But keep in mind that there are hundreds of models out there, including a lot of natural, safe products. Whatever you do, make sure the interior is wiped down.
Schedule Cleaning Time
This is another step you don’t want to skip. Cleaning your commercial oven should be done daily, probably in the evenings, and monthly. Monthly, you should give both the exterior and interior of your pizza oven a thorough, deep cleaning to guarantee high performance and a healthy environment to cook your meals.
Manage Boil-overs and Spills straightaway
Monthly and daily cleanings are not enough to keep your oven clean and safe to make pizzas for the public because of spills. Therefore, it’s only understandable that you attend to spills straightway to make not only your daily cleaning a breeze but also boost the oven performance all day.
That’s not all to be concerned about when it comes to cleaning your commercial pizza oven. It’s important to keep the oven cool before starting any task to prevent burns. I understand that cleaning a commercial oven daily and monthly won’t be anyone’s favorite task in the kitchen; it’s an invaluable process to ensure a high-performing and clean industrial kitchen.
Another thing to do aside from the tips discussed in this post is to consult the oven’s manuals for specific instructions on how best to clean the machine.
Related FAQs
Getting the best results from your pizza oven can be a tricky task. You want to make sure you have time for the oven to cool off before cleaning it so as not to damage the heating element. Use a scraper tightly wrapped in a dish towel or cloth and scrape away any stuck-on bits of dough or cheese.
Then, use a no-scratch scouring pad that is made for hard surfaces and scrub down the interior of the oven with water and detergent.
For industrial kitchens with a conveyor pizza oven, you should unplug the oven before cleaning it. The oven’s fingers should be properly cleaned since food debris like cheese sticks dries there.
Also, remove the belt and fingers, then spray with the oven cleaner while cleaning the oven’s interior before replacing all the sprayed parts.
The steps are similar to the steps discussed above but a little bit easier. Countertop commercial ovens come with crumb trays featuring a nonstick coating for easy release and a hassle-free cleaning experience.
Wrapping It Up
When you notice stains on your industrial-grade oven, cleaning it should be the first thing that pops up in your mind. Ensuring your oven is clean always guarantees it serves your purpose for years, and your food never has to taste nasty.
Nonetheless, it’s important to use the right methods for the best results. The oven should only be cleaned when it has cooled down to avoid accidents. The chimney, outside, and inside of the oven need to be cleaned regularly.