No, I'm not trying to make a smoker, I'm trying to keep my oven from smoking

If the slightest drop of any type of food gets on the bottom of our oven, it starts smoking and sets off the smoke detectors. Recently, I tried baking some bacon instead of putting in in a pan. The results were phenomenal, but the process resulted in having to hold our doors open for about half an hour, and the entire house filled with smoke and smelled like bacon for a day or two (which isn't as pleasant as it would sound - especially when you're trying to fall asleep).

Is there anything I can do to mitigate it? I'm currently cooking the bacon on a cookie cooling rack over a drop pan. Would lining the drop pan with bread to sop up the dropping grease help? Is there anything I can do?

Unfortunately we have no vent. Well, the microwave above the stove does have a vent mode, but all it does is take air from beneath it and shoot it out the front. It doesn't go outside or anything.

Just do what I did and get rid of the smoke detectors.

Also, I have a fan in the kitchen window aiming out, so while the kitchen gets smoky, the rest of the house is ok.

I doubt there's much you can do about this. This seems to me like a problem with the oven itself, more in particular the type of material that was used to cover the insides with.

Maybe you can try greasing the bottom of your oven with something like olive oil or something? No idea if this will help though...

Alternatively, you can try a roasting pan. This will prevent the grease from the food from dripping onto the bottom of your oven, effectively solving your problem. As you can see, it's not an expensive solution either. I'm using one of those things and I like it very much. It's easy to clean and very handy to use.

Maybe try cleaning the oven? My thought being that there might be a coating of grease on the oven and it can't take any more. Yeah, okay; it doesn't really make sense, but it's something to try.

Oh, maybe check to see if the oven door … gasket? … needs replacing. Or the door's spring. Normal amounts of smoke shouldn't really be able to escape a closed oven.

Also, I don't follow what's going on. You say you're cooking it over a pan, but the smoke happens when the grease hits the bottom of the oven. Is it missing the pan? Is the pan overflowing?

Sorry, I'm good at making things confusing. Those are two different instances. Sometimes stuff makes its way to the bottom of the oven and that causes smoke, but when cooking bacon it also causes smoke.


Yeah, I had the same thought, but I've run the oven through two cleaning cycles now, and it's been professionally cleaned


Yeah, I've been meaning to get one of our own. We used my mother's for the turkey on Thanksgiving... It might be worth a try.


Haha, good idea Actually, we've already been doing the less-than-ideal thing of covering them with Ziploc baggies whenever we know the oven is going to do this. (we take them off afterward)


Sadly our kitchen window doesn't open. We'd have to keep a door open, but we have cats that we don't want to escape.

I'm still thinking bad door seal/gasket. When you have the oven on, run your hand around the door, without touching the oven or the door, feeling for hot air leaking out.

My smoke detector always goes off whenever I cook bacon, or whenever I roast pork. It's as if the inventors of smoke detectors tried them out in lots of Orthodox Jewish and Muslim households and then said "Yep, these things work fine, no problems at all".

Peter

I don't recall ever seeing an oven with a door gasket. They tend to vent directly to the room they're in, so gasketing would be pointless.

My current oven, at least, has no gasket.

Maybe build your own fume scrubber (the water/whiffle ball kind)?

I don't recall ever seeing an oven without a door gasket. They'd be very dangerous without them:

If your oven has a flat floor, then there are heating coils directly below. The floor gets very hot, and that would take your bacon grease (or anything else) immediately to its smoking point. Step 1 is definitely to get a roasting pan or some other such device to keep spills and splatters from hitting the oven floor.

Step 2 is to make sure the oven is properly clean. Built-up grease on the oven will definitely smoke. You could do the self-cleaning cycle, which will presumably generate an uncomfortable amount of smoke. You can also get spray-gunk at your favorite supermarket. These tend to come in two flavors: those that have lye and those that don't. Lye-based cleaners are amazing (and amazingly dangerous), and they're not appropriate for a typical enameled oven interior (as in mlord's oven photo). Make sure you get the proper cleaner. Expect to spray, scrub, spray more, scrub more, etc.

Step 3 is definitely to double-check the oven gasket. That thing needs to be intact and clean. Working properly, you can have a smoky mess inside the oven and no corresponding smoky mess outside the oven.

Step 4, get an oven thermometer and check the temperature. It's possible your oven thermostat is busted and it's generating a whole lot more heat than you need for whatever you're trying to cook.

Finally, if all that fails, get a Weber grill (or equivalent) and do the smoky stuff outside. For things that require uniform heat, get a Dutch oven which you can put inside the Weber, directly in the coals.

I think the smoke detectors are too sensitive. I can't smell any smoke and they go off every time I use the oven.

I think mine are a tad too sensitive, but when there's a haze throughout my apartment on both floors, I can't really argue with them

I think my first step is going to be a roasting pan. Hopefully the drippings that fall into it won't reach the burning point like they would at the bottom of the oven. Thanks for all the other suggestions, folks.

This is more common than you'd think, and you'd usually only notice when baking, or cooking something that's particularly prone to being burnt. It's also something that's really easy to check.

Our last oven went out this way. Well, it wasn't the only thing wrong with it, but it was the final straw.

My MIL's old 1950s oven died a few years back, and so she bought a new electric range to replace it. The new one never seemed to work correctly, even after visits from the repairman to replace a faulty heating element.

Last year, SWMBO and I were visiting, and she mentioned all of this. Within an hour we'd gone out to the parts store, purchased a replacement thermostat/control unit, and installed it for her.

Works fine now.. seems to keep the temperature within 20 degrees (C) of what it claims, which is about as close as one might expect it to do.

Cheers

Yeah, they tested it round ours

We have this issue with cheese on toast and fish pie, why would it smoke with roast pork?

The thing about roast pork specifically, which of course you wouldn't know, is that if you roast it with the skin and subcutaneous fat on, the fat fries its way out through the skin and turns it into a tasty, snackable form called "crackling". But it only does this if you turn the oven up really hot at the end, like 230C or so. At that temperature the fat gets quite spitty and smoky. And I think pork fat usually has a lower melting point and smoke point than beef or lamb fat to start with. Foolishly buying cheap supermarket pork when it's on special offer, and discovering it's full of added water, doesn't help either.

I've never had smoke-alarm problems with cheese on toast or fish pie, not even when a fish pie overflowed a bit and got all burnt onto the bottom of the oven.

Peter

Aha, I'd never thought of it spitting. We've got a really old oven that has a crust of crud on the bottom and our fish pies do overflow quite a bit.

Hopefully smoky ovens will be a thing of the past soon, should move into the new house Aprilish finances permitting.

Seriously though, a smoke detector in a kitchen sounds like a nightmare to me. We use heat detectors in kitchens, at work. I had them all replaced as it was getting really annoying.

(Actually, I believe there could even ben some piece of regulation or policy here saying you can't have smoke detectors in kitchens... )