Cleanin' The BBQ or Cleanin' The Cooker!

I guess this should be called Cleanin' The Cooker as in the Orion Cooker.

The what? you say. It is a 2 part cooker where the heat is outside around the bottom in an outer ring and in the top in a little part that looks like a smokestack (but isn't)

Inside you put whatever is cooking, ribs, a turkey, chicken, pork roasts, really anything that can be cooked in a bbq. You can also add wood chips for flavor on the inside.

The food gets a nice smokey flavor and stays really moist. I've had mine for over 10 years and use it a lot. I really like it!

Check out the video that explains what they do.

I recently did ribs for 50 people at a friend's party. That involved a few test cooks to get my flavors right and 2 cooks for the party that ended up being 9 racks of ribs as well 2 tri-tips.

The Orion was a mess! I hadn't given it a really good cleaning in a while. After the party I decided this was the time. I only wanted to clean the outside and just to make it look better.

I don't think there is any reason to clean the inside. I didn't want to introduce cleaner chemicals or soap to the fine bbq smoke patina that had developed over these years. I do wipe the inside down and hose it off after every cook.

Here is a BEFORE picture of what I had to deal with. The big black marks are baked on and when I cleaned it with just soap and water they actually stood out more.

My strategy was to not use anything too harsh like oven cleaner or to not use power tools like a drill with a polishing or sanding wheel. Both of those would probably do the job quicker.

I assembled some things I'm pretty familiar with for this job.

cleaning/dish washing gloves or some disposable gloves
spray bottle with water
dish washing soap
Bar Keeper's Friend
coarse sanding sponge
Lava soap
Meguiar's A3714 Compound Water Spot Remover (auto detailing product)
Buck knife
Stainless Steel Cleaner

Amazon links above help by making a donation to The ALS Association Golden West Chapter. The price you pay stays the same.

With all of that ready to go I wanted to get this stainless steel looking better.

I started with a simple wash with dish washing soap and the coarse sanding sponge just to get a baseline to see what I had to do.

When that was done I put on some gloves and got the spray bottle of water and the Bar Keeper's Friend (BKF)

BKF has a little bit of oxalic acid powder as an active ingredient. It is pretty mild but follow the safety instructions. Oxalic acid is really popular among boaters and you can find stronger cleaners that use it at boat supply places. Here is a review of some of the marine cleaners that also use oxalic acid.

With the gloves on I put some BKF powder in my hand about enough to fill my palm. Then with the spray bottle I squirted the powder to make it pretty wet and rubbed it on the Orion.

You could also make a slurry of BKF in a plastic tub or something.

I rubbed it all over the Orion Cooker and let it sit. I don't know how long it is takes to do it's thing but I waited about an hour.

When that was done I rinsed it off with the hose to see how good it worked. Things went well. The cleaner parts were now really clean. However the baked on black streaks were still there.

Now I took the Lava soap and the Water Spot Remover and the heavy duty rubbing began.

I squirted the Water Spot Remover on the Orion and rubbed the stubborn spots with the Lava soap. With a lot of elbow grease parts of the baked on spots started to lift. The Water Spot Remover  has some grit and helps lubricate the surface for the Lava soap (that also has some grit) to work better.

There wasn't much cleaning going on here it was really sanding the spots down. I used the coarse sanding sponge with the Lava soap and Water Spot Remover as well. More came off.

Next I took my Buck knife and lightly scraped the spots followed by the sanding sponge rubbed with Lava soap. More came off. (yes I'll have to resharpen my knife after all of this)

After a few laps around the Orion Cooker with the knife I figured to let BKF have another shot at it so I repeated it all over again.

Clean with soap, apply Bar Keeper's Friend, wait, coarse sponge, Lava soap, Water Spot Remover, scrape.

Like I said mine was pretty bad. I ended up doing this about 6 times over 2 days!

When I decided I was done I gave it a last wash and dry then used some Stainless Steel cleaner.

There are still a few spots I didn't get but it sure looks a lot better!




I know there are other and probably better ways to do this but this worked for me, it just took a while!

If you are looking to clean some stainless steel you can apply these tips however know that the sanding and scraping will scratch the surface. It's not a big deal on the Orion Cooker but be aware of that on things you might clean. By the way I mostly rubbed in line with the grain of the stainless steel but also went in circles and against the grain. I think that variety of angles helped remove some stubborn areas.

The Bar Keeper's Friend is a good medium strength chemical cleaner to use and will get most of the non baked on stuff. I think I'll use it as a maintenance cleaner for the Orion Cooker as needed.


 


Like I said other than looks there isn't a reason to do this, and I know some people are proud of their BBQ Stripes. I look at it this way - now mine is clean and I can earn some new stripes!