How to Clean a Glass Stovetop

If you’ve never seen liquid burn, then you’ve probably never cooked on a glass stovetop—that, or you’re far more coordinated than I’ll ever be. Watching water transform into crusty residue sounds like something you’d do in a chem lab, but a kitchen with a glass stove is its own science course.

Say you’re making soup in a saucepan that’s too small. You’ve managed to make the broth fit and it’s boiling lovely, but once you add chicken and veggies, liquid’s overflowing like all those buckets of water in Fantasia. First comes the sizzle, then the smoke—and it stinks. Before you have a chance to soak up any of the liquid up with a dish towel, it hardens into stubborn crust that smokes and stinks every time you use that burner.

With their lack of holes and tricky coils, glass-topped stoves seem cleaner than their older counterparts, but they can still become a huge mess. If you’re not properly prepared to handle that mess, it never goes away, no matter how hard you scrub.

The good news is that you can clean your glass-top stove with a little patience and two items that are in your pantry right now. Remember how I said a glass-top stove is like a lab? Well, you can clean that crust off with the first formula you ever learned:

Baking soda + Vinegar = Reaction!

The difference here is that while your childhood paper mache volcano exploded instantly, this process involves patience. Also, you’ll need hot water and a towel.

Sarra Sedghi

Spray or pour white vinegar over the crust once your stove has cooled down. (Do not mess with a warm stovetop, it could hurt you and will definitely create more crust!) Next, coat the vinegary areas with baking soda. Submerge your towel in hot water and wring it so the entire thing is damp, and cover the vinegar and baking soda for 10-15 minutes. Once you remove the towel, scrub the stovetop with a textured cloth (microfiber works best!), using the clumps of baking soda to your advantage on any particularly thick crust. Dispose the clumps and spray some more vinegar as needed to pick up remaining crust and eliminate streaks.

For extra stubborn residue, you might need a scraper or a stronger cleaning solution.