Cooking Louisiana  -  Cleaning aluminum pots  

Cleaning aluminum pots especially baked on or burnt on grease and the carbon stains under the pot was tough until now. Magnalite pots are popular and baked on grease is the biggest cleaning complaint. You can't use an oven cleaner such as Easy Off because it's so caustic to the aluminum. Well good news my friends, I've found two products that are advertised to clean aluminum pots of baked on grease and oil, and, remove the carbon stains on the bottom.

One product is Carbon-Off and the other is Sokoff (pronounced soak-off).

Each of these products (to my knowledge) are sold only at restaurant supply houses. You can also find them at a few select websites.

Here is one of my pathetic examples of baked on grease... this is an old hammered aluminum pot. This pot hasn't been cleaned in over 15 years. I used the Carbon-Off product because that's the only one I could find in Lafayette, LA.

Before Baked on grease



After Baked on grease



I had to coat this one a few times just to get off what I got off. You can still see I have a little more to do. (I did one side and spun it around for the picture)

Read the instructions carefully, this stuff is just as dangerous as any oven cleaner.

You can also use this on stove-top parts, just read the manufacturers directions and cautions before using.

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