What is a Pyrolytic Oven? And why I am blown away at how it cleans!

You’re in the market for an oven for one of two reasons, you’re building a home or renovating your kitchen, OR your current oven has kicked the bucket and you desperately need a new one.

A few months ago we were in the latter situation, the oven we installed six years ago when we renovated our kitchen was dead. Not working at all. It’s time was up.

When searching the web for new ones it was clear there were many types and many brands, but I wanted this one to last, and I wanted it to be good.

Quite by utter chance, I had done a segment on The Today Show just two weeks earlier about kitchen appliances, so I had some contacts I could call to ask what it all meant.

Quickly I ruled out Steam ovens, Combination Microwaves and all these strange things. Frankly, we just needed an oven.

However, there was one word which kept coming up in Oven searches – Pyrolytic.

What is a Pyrolytic Oven?

So I asked, I called around, it’s a self-cleaning oven. Well, you had me at hello.

Problematically, the prices of these ovens are much higher than their standard siblings, but today, I am here to tell you – it’s worth it.

We ended up buying an Asko Pyrolytic Oven. It’s an electric oven, with all the usual fan oven settings, top heat settings and what not, but the key difference here was Pyrolytic.

As a side note, it was also made clear to me and confirmed by my research that paying more for a big name brand like Asko did also offer a more accurate cooking temperature.

But that isn’t why I’m pumped today.

The two enamel oven trays that came with the oven are big, they are grey, and they are perfect for roasting veges as we often do.

However, they were starting to look – horrible. And I mean, past the point of scrubbing horrible.

Don’t judge me, I really did try to keep them clean.

But then I remembered, the Pyrolytic cleaning. So I grabbed the Asko manual from my wife’s carefully sorted filing drawers, and looked up the how to.

After removing the fancy slide-out guide rails inside the oven and replacing them with the boring standard oven rails, I placed one of the Enamel trays in the oven.

Twisted the dial to cleaning, and chose Pyrolytic. And I went for the high setting. That’s a four hour “burn”.

I say that because that’s what a Pyrolytic clean is. It’s high temps, which burns all the grim away.

A quick peek with the light mid way through gave me great hope.

But at the end. Bloody hell, this was a real wow moment.

This is what the tray looked like when I put it in:

This is what it looked like when I took it out:

Strewth!

Now, to clean the second tray, then to run the cycle again for the oven itself.

Plus, this thing has an Aqua clean too – for getting the basic grime and grease off the walls of the oven.

I’m sold on Pyrolytic cleaning, and can’t see myself ever buying a non-Pyrolytic oven again!

For reference, the model we bought was this one: The Good Guys

And for full declaration, the good people at Asko did sell me the oven at a discounted price, but in all honesty that was still way more than the cheap basic ovens we were looking at. Worth it.