But Is It Squeaky?

For a few years now my raw aluminum baking sheet has been collecting a bit of a patina.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this polymerized, baked on grease save for the fact that it's a little unsightly.

However, it is incredibly difficult to clean off.

Normally one might want to use an abrasive cleaner, like a scotch-brite pad and/or some Comet cleaner. Unfortunately the aluminum is quite soft, and so this tends to scour the metal just as much as it scours the grease.

On the non-abrasive side, it's well known that lye based cleaners, like your standard oven cleaners, will cut through this type of polymerized grease. Unfortunately aluminum is also vulnerable to those exact same cleaners.

This leaves us in a bit of a pickle. Or, does it?

The self-cleaning cycle on a domestic oven runs at around 500°C, and pure raw aluminum doesn't melt until 660°C, so that's a good 160°C of headroom!

And wouldn't you know it.

It worked like a charm.

Also the oven itself is now slightly cleaner, though it wasn't very dirty to begin with since it hadn't been very long since the last time I ran the self-cleaning cycle.