How To Clean A Microwave Safely

There’s nothing worse than coming home after a hard day’s work and opening a microwave which is covered in stuck-on-food.

Nobody wants to have to put in the elbow grease to clean that.

So, they don’t and it gets worse and worse.

And it doesn’t have to be like that because cleaning a microwave is super easy, when you know how.

Let’s see how you can clean your microwave with no effort at all and, most importantly, completely safely too.

This process works well for any microwave (such as our best countertop microwaves) and isn’t specific to any model or manufacturer.

This method will work well on pretty much any kind of built up dirt too.

Microwaves are hot and the food spits and, occasionally, explodes. Oil evaporates. That kind of thing, so it’s normal for a microwave to get dirty even if you try to avoid it.

So, cleaning needs to be able to cut through all of that and it should be easy:

All you need for this is:

Half a fresh lemon
A microwave safe bowl
A cloth or paper towel (we use a microfiber cloth because it’s more eco-friendly to wash and reuse than to throw away)

And then you use this simple process:

Take the microwave safe bowl and fill it to the halfway point with cold water
Take the half a fresh lemon and squeeze all the juice into the bowl of water
Then put the lemon half in the water too
Place the bowl (including lemon and water) in your microwave
Turn the microwave up to full power
Run the microwave for 5 minutes
Using oven gloves or other precautions remove the hot bowl from the microwave
Wipe the surfaces in the microwave using your cloth or towel
Dip the towel/cloth in the water and wipe down the inside and outside of the microwave door
Then making sure most of the moisture has been wrung out of the towel/cloth give the whole exterior surface a wipe down too

And that should see everything removed.

Note: If you don’t have a lemon, then you can replace the water with a 1:1 solution of white vinegar and water, instead.

What To Do If It’s Not Perfectly Clean, Yet?

If there are still some stubborn bits of food stuck to the walls of the microwave – don’t fight them. Just put the bowl back in for another 5 minutes (top up the water level first) and do it again.

How This Works

The acid in the lemon juice (or vinegar) makes it easy to cut through any grease that has built up inside and the lemon will make the finished microwave smell nice too.

Otherwise, most of the cleaning process here is carried out by the water which produces steam when you run the microwave and that hydrates all the stuff stuck to the microwave walls.

This makes it less “sticky” and much easier to remove by just wiping it down.

This process is entirely safe because it’s fine to use your microwave to heat water, in fact, you probably do it every now and again, already, right?