Author: BBQ Master Cleaner

An Aga is not an oven with a bigger footprint. It’s a lump of cast iron weighing somewhere between a quarter and half a tonne, clad in glass, packed with insulation, and running continuously for decades in a room that was built before anyone thought about floor loading. Everything about cleaning one follows from that. […]

Every van in this trade carries a heated caustic tank, and the tank is the reason a professional clean beats a Saturday afternoon with a scourer. It is also the reason a fair number of barbecues come back from a clean worse than they went in. The dip works on a narrow set of materials: […]

Why does a Josper foul an extraction system faster than a bank of ranges? Because it burns solid fuel, and solid fuel produces a deposit that behaves nothing like the one every kitchen extract specification was written around. A gas six-burner with a salamander over it throws vaporised fat into the canopy. That fat condenses […]

What does an adjudicator see when a landlord claims for the oven? Nothing. That’s the answer, and it’s the single thing most tenants and a fair number of letting agents fail to grasp. An adjudicator at the TDS, the DPS or mydeposits does not come to your flat. They do not smell the kitchen. They […]

What does a pyrolytic cycle burn off, and what does it leave behind? Pyrolysis works. I want that on the record before I spend the rest of this piece picking at it, because there is a lot of nonsense written about self-cleaning ovens by people who have never watched one run. You lock the door, […]

I stood over a gas barbecue in Peckham last summer, staring at a lid that looked spotless on the outside but hid a layer of sticky black grease under every ridge. The owner swore he kept it “clean enough”, yet the moment I turned the burners on, smoke rolled out in thick clouds and the […]