Clean ovens are not something that typically cause me to worry. For that matter dirty ovens don't bother me much either. I do pay a lot of attention to my frying pans. I regularly clean the pans that I use. I treat the cast iron ones with care.
To be truthful when I use the oven, it is almost always for biscuits, bread, or rolls. None of those make much of a mess in a modern oven. If meat get cooked in the oven, usually my wife does it. If meat get cooked outside, I cook it. I watch and turn my fair share of meat especially sausage and bacon that is cooked in a pan on the stove but certainly I am not completely responsible for all that is cooked there.
Our clean oven problem started a few weeks ago. At a farmer's market we bought some bratwursts from Cherry Hill Farm, a local producer. The next day gave us a beautiful, warm North Carolina fall evening so I threw them on the grill without boiling them. They turned out great but only because I paid attention to them. They were like cooking little blowtorches as they heated up and grease came squirting out the ends and immediately caught fire.
Still they were delicious and we bought a couple more packs. The weather turned unusually cold for fall in North Carolina and the time changed so it was dark at about grilling time. I was working late anyway so my wife offered to cook our recent pack of bratwursts in the oven. Without getting into too much detail, the bratwursts got a fair amount of grease on the oven walls. Our oven walls happen to be fairly new since we have only been in our house for a few months.
As anyone reading this within a few days of it being posted knows, Thanksgiving is on the not very distant horizon. Like many households, we have a turkey planned for our Thanksgiving meal. It turns out that if you cook a turkey in an oven that has just been coated by some bratwurst, you are likely to have smoke which would end up setting off all the smoke detectors in the house.
The potential of a smokey Thanksgiving motivated my wife to take the oven by the horns. She ran three quick cleaning cycles. Quick might be part of the name the manual gives the process, but it took her a significant amount of time and wiping to get the oven back to her standards. We now have a very clean oven with a looming Thanksgiving meal.
So there is conundrum, we traditionally roast our turkey uncovered in an open pan. Turkey roasting is a well known way to create a not so clean oven. Getting an oven dirty this soon after it has been cleaned seems somehow to disrespect all the work that went into cleaning the oven. Yet we have a turkey that needs cooking.
So far I have volunteered to cook our turkey which happens to a turkey breast on the grill. My wife has countered with the idea of cooking the turkey in an oven bag. I have already found a great grilled turkey breast recipe so I hope to get a chance to prove my grilling skills. Since we are a single oven family, there would be other advantages. The oven would be available for the broccoli casserole, sweet potato casserole, and the pumpkin pie.
This might be the only kind of problem that I am willing to tackle during Thanksgiving.
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