This Funny-Looking Product Will Clean the Microwave for You
By Alyse Whitney. Photos courtesy of Angry Mama/Amazon.
After heating up leftover pasta bolognese, your microwave looks like a murder scene. Splatters of sauce are everywhere. You should wipe it up, but your pasta is piping-hot and ready to be devoured on the couch while watching Master of None. So you close the microwave door slowly and walk away. Flash-forward to the next morning: there's bits of meat, sauce, and maybe even slivers of pasta in there. Then you wait even longer, until it's really crusted on. We're afraid the time has come—it's time to clean your microwave.
I put this off for many months (sorry, mom) and was dreading scrubbing down my above-stove, built-in microwave until I met my new best friend: Angry Mama. The as-seen-on-TV product looks like a giant Lego lady with fiery red hair—also available as a wannabe-Elle Woods blonde or a purple-haired, hipster Mama—but she can really clean.
It's almost laughably easy to use the Angry Mama. I wiped up any big crumbs with a damp paper towel, then filled up the Angry Mama's plastic body with vinegar and water—measurement lines marked inside—and an optional spritz of lemon juice for a nice scent. I set the microwave for seven minutes and walked away. It made one scary splattering noise, but mostly just steamed up everything inside. After a two-minute cooldown, I removed her using her plastic arms ("the arms stay cooler," the packaging told me), carefully took out the glass turntable using a potholder (WARNING: IT GETS VERY HOT!) to wash it separately, and wiped the microwave clean with a sponge. (Highly recommend Shark Tank marvel, and my first as-seen-on-TV love, the Scrub Mommy.) Everything came off immediately and the active cleaning time was about five minutes. If any gunk is stubborn, you can use leftover water-vinegar mixture in Angry Mama on your sponge for more cleaning power. I wiped everything down with another damp paper towel to get any residual vinegar, but the scent dissipated within an hour.
My microwave wasn't caked in sauce or grease like you see in the infomercial. It was a relatively easy clean that I probably shouldn't have ignored for so long. But even if your microwave is full of stuck-on food, the vinegar-water steam trick is the key to an easy clean. Test kitchen assistant Gaby Melian doesn't have an Angry Mama, so she uses a microwave-safe glass bowl of equal parts water and vinegar instead.
If you use the bowl method, you should put a toothpick or chopstick in the bowl to keep it from boiling over. As the Mythbusters proved, when you superheat water (aka take it past the boiling point) in a microwave, it can explode when you remove it. So Gaby microwaves for five minutes at first, lets it cool, and then adds a little dish soap to the vinegar-water mixture to scrub it out. If food is still stuck-on after the first go-'round, put the bowl back in for a few more minutes. Just be careful handling that super-hot glass turntable when you take it out to clean it. (Yes, I speak from burned experience.)
Both of these options are astoundingly easy, but I have to say that Angry Mama sitting by the microwave staring at me with her cartoonish enraged face motivates me to clean more often. Aim to clean once a week—hell hath no fury like Angry Mama scorned.
This story originally appeared on Bon Appetit.
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