This Cornstarch Hack Is Supposed To Clean Greasy Oven Racks. We Put It To The Test

Cooking my own healthy, creative meals is satisfying — but the cleanup is a royal pain. One place that collects plenty of greasy drips and drabs from my recipes is the oven, and boy are those racks a challenge to get sparkling. They don't fit in the sink or dishwasher, and so I find myself neglecting them for months at a time. The grease builds and the once-bright metal becomes discolored until I eventually find myself motivated to take the racks out and clean them. But how? 

One hack that has made the rounds online is to use cornstarch (known as "cornflour" in the U.K. and Australia) as an effective oven rack cleaner. As a fan of using nontoxic products as a way to naturally clean the home, I was happy to hear that cornstarch might be a good cleaner for my racks; after all, it's a pantry staple that I always have on hand. So, I donned my rubber gloves and set out to try it.

Along with its usefulness in thickening sauces and coating meat for frying, cornstarch is a proven wonder at cleaning up messy kitchen grease splatters from counters, pans, and stove tops. Made from the endosperm of corn kernels, this fine powder works so well because of its ability to absorb oil from surfaces. It's also odorless and nontoxic, unlike many other oven cleaners, so it made sense that it could help brighten my oven racks. 

I was wrong. The hack I'd read said to add some warm water to the cornstarch to make a paste, which I could then apply to all the nooks and crannies of my racks. Turns out that, while making such a paste might help get a grease stain out of upholstery or swipe over a flat stovetop surface, it was a useless mess when applied to the narrow metal spindles of my oven racks. The cornstarch paste quickly solidified into a weird, crumbly substance that didn't stick to the metal at all, even when I tried scrubbing with a damp cloth. I tried varying amounts of water to try and get a consistency that would stick to the rack, but to no avail. 

The next thing I tried was moistening the rack and sprinkling the cornstarch all over it — just to see if this would be helpful in absorbing greasy grime. I laid my racks on some old towels, doing my best to coat them in a fine layer of cornstarch (this took a lot of cornstarch). I let them sit like this for 30 minutes, then rinsed them off awkwardly in the sink and scrubbed at them with a sponge. The result? They came out looking pretty much the same as they did before I'd applied cornstarch. I will say that the racks were less greasy to the touch after this effort, which was no surprise given cornstarch's ability to absorb grease. But polished and clean? Nope. 

It could be that the shape of an oven rack is just too big a challenge for cornstarch, in which case you might be better off spraying on a cleaning solution of baking soda and vinegar, or wiping it with some soap and water. However, I think that adopting a more regular cleaning schedule — removing the racks and giving them a good wipe down — is probably a better way to keep ahead of the grime. At any rate, I'll be saving the cornstarch for my next pot of soup or batch of waffles... and not my oven racks.