I'm of the firm belief that most specialty cleaners are not only overly priced, but are often not the best products for the jobs they are marketed for, and often do not work at all.Current case in point are the cleaning products made especially for cleaning ceramic and glass top stoves. I know this because we recently purchased one of these ranges and while cooking our holiday meal this weekend the applesauce bubbled out of its pot and onto the glass where it quickly caramelized then burned to a dark black, hard-as-rock recalcitrant mess.
To remove the easy to get schmootz and cooking debris I went over the surface with a warm water and dish soap soaked sponge. Remaining was the black rock-textured blob of burnt sugar, so I pulled out the next weapon from my cleaning arsenal , a heavy duty scouring pad, which took the surface off the burnt sugar but no matter how much elbow grease I put into the task, it could not budge the lithic blob entirely. At this point I pulled out the specialty cleaner, made only to clean glass and ceramic stove tops like ours. Let me be frank here, the specialty cleaner did NOTHING toward removing the cooked on sugar. I began to panic mildly at this point, thinking I'd ruined our brand new, not inexpensive appliance, but pulled out the one tool I knew could make short shrift of the rock, IF it didn't scratch the surface, which I was pretty sure it wouldn't, but was fearful because all the literature that comes with the range says NOT to use anything rougher than a scotch-brite-like scouring pad and the cleaning product they say to use--which doesn't work. What is a cleaning woman to do?
Break the rules, of course. I first squeezed a large dollop of dish soap directly onto the spill. Then, slowly and carefully I scrubbed in a circular motion with one of my favorite green cleaning tools, a metal scouring pad, on a small patch to test. Miraculously, the black began lifting easily, and as I thought, it did NOT scratch the surface a bit. Within a minute or two of scrubbing in this way, then wiping with a clean, wet sponge to remove the loosened residue, the stove top was sparkling like the first day we got it!
Disclaimer: Please don't take my word for this with your glass or ceramic stove top. I'm only vouching here for my first hand experience and success. Always make sure to TEST a new cleaner or implement in a very small, inconspicuous area before going gangbusters with it.
