Stainless steel is also super easy to clean. But like most surfaces, it can still get caked with grease. If you’re running a commercial kitchen, you’re going to want to know how to get grease off of stainless steel.
Why It’s So Important to Keep Your Stainless Clean
General tidiness and cleanliness is paramount in keeping your food, and therefore your customers, safe. While the stainless can’t easily house bacteria, caked on food and grease can.
Also, if you just leave old grease and food sitting on your stainless steel surfaces, it will contaminate your food, especially in your fryer.
For On-Shift Cleaning
Throughout each shift, your employees should be wiping up messes as they go with a simple sanitizer. For a full wipe down, dish soap is an anti-grease and can be helpful for messes you can’t get to immediately.
Baking Soda and Vinegar
A mixture of baking soda and vinegar can take off stains and tough grease spots that build up. Make a baking soda paste with water, rub it over the grease and let it sit for a while.
Baking soda is coarse, so be mindful of scratching your stainless steel equipment. After the baking soda paste has sat for a little bit, wipe it mostly away before pouring white vinegar over it. The reaction of vinegar and baking soda helps clear the stain. And as a bonus, vinegar is great for polishing stainless steel..
Baby Oil
Using baby oil may seem counter productive, but it works. Put a small amount of baby oil on a towel and dap the grease stain. The baby oil will “rehydrate” the grease enough that soap is able to do the trick cleaning it up after that. Baby oil is another product that helps to shine the stainless steel too.
For Those Really Tough Grease Stains
Let’s say you inherit a kitchen that wasn’t well taken care of, or it's spring cleaning time. Maybe, it’s in a place that you can’t do a thorough cleaning of as often—like the vent hood. Old, dry grease can be a real pain to clean.
Sometimes, the above methods will work, but sometimes, you need something with a bit more muscle. When you need a more aggressive solution, degreaser is going to be the answer.
Degreaser is a chemical agent that is made to dissolve grease and oil, but directions on how to use it may vary slightly depending on which one you use.
Regardless of what you use, the more you clean your kitchen, the less catch-up cleaning you’ll have to do. Choose Darling Ingredients automated UCO Systems to mitigate some grease splatter and spillage and keep your employees safe and focused on what’s most important—making the food.
How NOT to Clean Stainless
Stainless can last you forever, but only if you treat it right. Here are some common mistakes when it comes to cleaning your stainless steel.
Don’t Leave it Wet
While leaving water on stainless might not damage it immediately, it can leave stains that you’ll have to clean again later on. If your restaurant has hard water, it can make it that much worse. Make sure you wipe it down and keep it dry.
Don’t Use Bleach
Bleach is always a tempting option to use when you are dealing with tough stains, but it is never a good idea to use on stainless steel. Bleach will eat away at the chromium oxide coating that makes it “stainless” and leave the equipment vulnerable to rust.
If you use bleach on your stainless steel, the best case scenario is that it will stain it, and you don’t want that either.
Be Careful with Scrubbing
When cleaning tough stains, some elbow grease and steel wool can go a long way, but it will also scratch whatever it is you’re cleaning. Steel wool and muscle on a stainless steel surface will take off the stainless coating and create pores the bacteria can get into.
Keep Your Fryers Well-Maintained and Shiny
It is likely you also have stainless steel appliances and deep fryers too. Clean them often and thoroughly so you don’t run into problems down the line. Well cared for stainless steel will serve you well for years.
For more grease and UCO management tips, talk to Darling Ingredients Canada. We have automated UCO systems and used cooking oil collection services you can count on and solutions you can be proud to be a part of.