Help! I've melted an oven mitt on my gas range grill!

[dianne0712]

I accidentally put an oven mitt down on top of the grate on top of my gas stove. Even though the burner was off, the grate on top of it was still hot enough to melt the oven mitt covering and now I have melted polyester on my grate. I've soaked it in hot water and Dawn, but it's not coming off. Any ideas?

[kaleokahu]

Kiss it with an angle grinder.

[GH1618]

Take it outside and burn it off with a propane torch. You need to heat the whole thing, though. Spread the heat around to avoid overstressing the part you need to clean, and allow it to cool down slowly, as suggested above.

[shaogo]

That's brilliant. I used to use a brazing torch to do creme brulee until I finally broke down and bought one of the smaller ones designed for the purpose.

Also, it's good to be aware that cast iron will break under very extreme conditions, but that's only, in my experience, when the cast iron is rendered red hot. At least our huge grates on commercial stoves have never broken despite the ridiculous things we end up doing to 'em...

[Chemicalkinetics]

<I've soaked it in hot water and Dawn>

It wont' come off. If it would, then that mean your gloves would dissolve in hot water and Dawn. Shaogo is correct. You are basically at the point of no return. You can only go forward. There are two similar things you can try. One is to heat the grate very hot and burn everything off. The other one is to heat the grate up and the glove residue is soften again. At this point, you can scrap with a metal tool.

[INDIANRIVERFL]

Same with knife handles. Heat and cool slowly, or the cast iron may shatter. Mine did.

[law_doc89]

Or, place in your oven on self clean. Just open the windows if you do the burning inside; who knows of what your mitt is made!

[shaogo]

What a superb idea! Herein below I suggest playing around with fire. For people at home who may be squeamish about doing that, the self-clean idea is the best!

In fact, I have a grill that's got a self-clean cycle on it -- it's wonderful and works great in about 45 mins-an hour. I'm going to try to put some of our soiled stove parts in there and see what happens...

[shaogo]

Burn it off.

If you don't want to do it over the kitchen gas flame, do it on your gas grill outside.

Get the grate from the stove smoking hot and believe me, every bit of that melted plastic will be off in 15-20 minutes.

You must get the grates nearly red-hot to do this.

In our restaurant when there's accumulated gunk that won't wash off, we can turn the stove grates upside down, burn 'em up (literally red-hot) for a while with the exhaust fan going, and they're spic 'n span!