3 Amazing tips for Clean Stainless Steel Pans!

Let’s say you’re cooking dinner, preheating your stainless steel skillet to sear some lamb chops with briny anchovies and capers. You add oil, wait, and then place the meat in the pan, after which you toss in the rest of your ingredients. Alas, those delicious toppings get a little burnt as the chops cook through, sticking to the pan and leaving a hardened crust of oil behind.

Don’t despair: Even seasoned cooks can scorch a pan, whether they’re searing meat at high temperatures or fiddling with a delicate sauce. But cleaning those tough stains isn’t as much of a pain if you have the right gear and supplies. Based on our years of experience cooking at home and in professional kitchens, here are the techniques we use to keep our cookware gleaming.

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Three methods for cleaning tough stains

The simplest method: Baking soda and elbow grease

It’s always easier to clean a scorched pan as soon as possible after cooking. To remove cooked-on oil or burnt food when dish soap and scrubbing aren’t cutting it, create a slurry of water and baking soda or another powdered cleaner in the bottom of the pan. Don’t be afraid to be generous with the 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). If the stains won’t come off, you can repeat these steps and let the paste sit for longer, even overnight.

An extra step for bigger stains: Boil the baking soda first

For bigger, tougher stains that climb up the sides of a saucepan or skillet, Geri Porter, the longtime kitchen manager for Martha Stewart, suggested the following method: Add a small mound of baking soda to the center of a pan, cover with about ¼ cup water (you might need more for a bigger pan), and bring to a boil. As the water boils and evaporates, it will leave a film of baking soda around the walls of the pan that you can then scrub off. When most of the water has boiled off, turn off the heat and use a long-handled brush or scouring pad to scrub off your mess (again, new pads will work better). It’s best to do this while the pan is still hot, so it may help to use gloves and grip the pan with a towel or oven mitt. We’ve had success with this method for freshly scorched pans, but it isn’t as effective for boiling off years of grime.

A more involved method for years of grime: Boil the whole pan with baking soda

To truly banish all scorch marks—even years of baked-on oil—with the least amount of scrubbing, we turn to Wirecutter kitchen writer Michael Sullivan’s method. He fully submerges his dingiest pans in a pot of boiling water and baking soda to boil the stains off. Although it’s a little awkward to wrangle a large metal object from a pot of steaming water, the results are magical. With minimal scrubbing, our pans were gleaming—even a formerly blackened 10-year old All-Clad skillet.