Prevent Sticky Grease From Building Up In Your Kitchen With 3 Simple Tips

Grease is an unavoidable byproduct of using your kitchen. When you cook, especially with oil or fatty foods, grease particles make their way into the air, mixing with other dust and grime and eventually landing on your kitchen surfaces. Grease buildup is sticky, unattractive, and potentially even dangerous. A greasy kitchen is a great way to increase the chances of a fire and can even cause respiratory issues. Thankfully, there are three simple tips that will help keep the grease from building up.

As the grease in your kitchen comes via cooking, we'll start at the stove with our first tip: Use a splatter screen or a lid when cooking. A splatter screen is a circular, handled lid made of mesh that sits over a frying pan or pot to prevent hot grease from splashing. The mesh screen allows steam to escape but traps oils before they get to your countertops. You can also consider another version consisting of an adjustable silicone collar that fits into the pan and forms a high wall around it, letting you access the food you're cooking while blocking grease splatter. A pot lid is equally as useful for keeping grease at bay, though it has a different effect than the splatter screen. Because a lid is solid, it traps the steam instead of releasing it. This allows your food to cook much faster and maintains a more consistent temperature and even heating.

Everyone wants to have a clean kitchen, but the minutiae of cleaning all those little nooks and crannies is not something anyone really wants to spend their time doing. However, it is important to know how often every kitchen item should be cleaned, especially if you want to prevent nasty grease buildup that will only get harder to clean the longer you leave it. How you approach cleaning your kitchen needs is akin to learning a musical instrument or sport. The more often you practice it, the more routine it becomes and the less aggravating it is going to be. You can split your kitchen cleaning schedule into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Daily tasks include wiping down your counters, stove top, and sink with an all-purpose cleaner to remove light grease, while weekly and monthly tasks are more like mopping your floors and cleaning your oven.

This is important to do because it means you avoid having to do a deep clean later on. Remember, the more you allow grease and grime to build up in the kitchen, the more difficult it is to remove. And it's not like you need to go out and buy some expensive cleaner. There are plenty of simple homemade tricks to clean kitchen grease using everyday items in your cabinets, including baking soda and cornstarch.

Here's the truth of things: If your kitchen does not have a range hood installed over the stove, your grease-fighting efficiency is severely limited. A range hood is a device that sits over your stove and removes odor, smoke, and grease from the air during cooking. The particles are syphoned via fans through filters. The clean air is either recirculated through the kitchen or sent outside via duct work, depending on the variety of range hood. If it makes more sense for your kitchen, you will also find many over-the-range microwaves that have built-in air filtration and venting functions, though some find they aren't as efficient at trapping grease as range hoods.

Once you choose a range hood that is best suited to your kitchen, you could very likely see a dramatic improvement in the overall cleanliness of the space. However, this is not a be-all-end-all solution. You need to clean your range hood just like any other appliance in your kitchen. This can be filed under the monthly kitchen cleaning chores we mentioned earlier. To clean your range hood, you will need to remove and clean the filter that is collecting the grease particles from the air. Soak the filter in your sink for a half an hour in a solution of baking soda, boiling water, and dishwasher detergent. These help dissolve the built up grease, making for easier scrubbing and grease removal. It would also be a good idea to clean the inside of the hood periodically, as any grease build up can reduce the efficiency of the hood over time. Keep it well maintained, and you will have a far cleaner kitchen.