Saturday, July 16, 2011

Cleaning a Burnt Cooking Pot

On Thursday (two days ago) I had no homework from summer school at all, and I was very glad that I could finally spend the evening doing whatever I liked.

Unfortunately, a disastrous event occurred— one of the cooking pots got burnt (I'll skip over the details...)! As a result, I had to spend about three or four hours trying to clean the cooking pot and my evening was wasted.

This isn't my cooking pot, but it's something that my cooking pot looked like

Well, the evening wasn't exactly wasted, as I have actually learned how to clean a burnt cooking pot (how exciting)! I have tried a lot of methods to clean the cooking pot, and I have learned which ones were effective and which ones weren't. So I will post all the methods (all from the Internet) that I have tried and their effectiveness for anyone who is interested to know, and (hopefully not) for future reference. 

Boiling Salt Water
At first, I put some water into the pot so that it was enough to cover the burnt areas, and then I added a lot of salt into the water. Next, I boiled the salt-water and tried to scratch the black things off of the pot using a spoon. Unfortunately this did close to nothing, which meant that all I had done was wasting my salt.

Egg Shells
After the first failed attempt, I took some egg shells (three eggs), washed off the egg whites, and then placed them into the cooking pot. After that, I took a scouring pad, and began to scrub the cooking pot with the egg shells in between the pot and the scouring pad. This created a lot of friction that actually cleaned the cooking pot very well!

Unfortunately, as soon as all the egg shells were broken down into little pieces, this method stopped working. And as I only had three eggs available, I could no longer use this method, and had to move on and use another method.

Boiled Detergent-Water Mixture
This method was similar to the "boiling salt water" method, except that this time I added two to three table spoons of detergent into the water instead of salt. Also, after the mixture boiled, I waited for another twenty minutes before I proceeded to scratch the pot with a spoon.

The twenty minutes of waiting time actually allowed the mixture to somehow remove the majority of the black stuff that was on the pot. Then, I easily scratched off the rest using the metal spoon. This was the end of nightmare for me. Hooray!
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If you are having trouble cleaning your burnt cooking pot, use the second or third method, or both of them, and hopefully you'll be able clean it successfully!