I Tested This Popular Cleaning Powder On My Dingy Pan And The Results Surprised Me

I’ve read so many reviews and articles about Bar Keepers Friend that I’ve come to think of it as magic fairy dust in a can. That stuff seems to fix everything: scratches on plates, sullied oven racks, burnt pots, obscure under-eye circles. (Okay, not the last one. I wish!) But I never actually tried this stuff  for myself until recently. I decided to put it to the test on a sheet pan with baked-on grime that was resistant to any of my other usual cleaning methods. The results surprised me.

What Is Bar Keepers Friend?

Bar Keepers Friend

This inexpensive powdered cleaner has been around since 1882 and is primarily made of oxalic acid, a compound found naturally in fruits and vegetables. Fun fact: The product’s inventor, a chemist named George William Hoffman, discovered the cleaning power of this acid when he cooked up some rhubarb and noticed that the pot was extra tidy and sparkling after he cleaned it. The substance worked well on brass, and Hoffman sold it to bar owners who used it to polish their brass rails, hence the name. While there are many more cleaning products in the line today, like the cookware cleanser above, the company behind Bar Keepers Friend says the formula isn’t that much different from the original.

How To Use Bar Keepers Friend

Because I was cleaning a metal sheet pan, I used Bar Keepers Friend Cookware Cleanser & Polish, which “contains 50% more grease-cutting detergents than our other cleansers”, according to the product description. Following the directions on the label, I sprinkled a generous amount of the powder over the moist baking sheet and let it sit for one minute. Then I used a moist kitchen sponge to buff away the stains and rinsed the pan.   

What I Thought

PHOTO:

Lisa Cericola

PHOTO:

Lisa Cericola

While some stains disappeared, the bulk of them remained. I repeated the process three more times, and put a little elbow grease into my scrubbing, which helped remove more, but not all, of the discolored areas. By then, my fingers were pruney and arid from the cleaner, so I rinsed the pan tidy. In the end, it did look much better (as you can see in the right photo above), but it was a lot more work to tidy than I was expecting. Perhaps I should have let the powder sit on the pan longer, which is something I will try in the future.