Drew is the sweetest. I’m not just saying that because he is sitting right next to me and reading over my shoulder as I’m typing, either. Which he is doing, no matter how much I tell him it annoys me. 😉

Anyway, I mentioned last week to my mom that our stainless steel pots and pans were all discolored and had stains on the bottoms–mainly because Drew’s apartment has an electric stove, so the rings burn everything into the pan bottoms. We have the pots and pans hanging on a rack that is over the bathroom door right next to the kitchen, so their pan butts are in plain view all the time. Not the most attractive with there are brownish splotches all over them. So anyway, I asked my mom if she knew a good way to get the stains off. She said not to worry about them because who cares what the bottoms of the pans look like, but that we could try different combinations of baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice, and water and scrub them and see if that worked.

I had completely forgotten about them but then today, I get up from doing my homework and walk over to the kitchen and not only did Drew wash all the dishes, but he had successfully figured out how to get the majority of the stains off our pots and pans! How sweet!

He said that he researched it and the discoloration and staining could build up and eventually affect the cooking quality of the pans. We would like them to last as long as possible, plus it doesn’t hurt if they look better in the process!

Here you can obviously see how discolored the big one was. The one on the right had already been cleaned. You can see that not 100% of the discoloration came off, but the worst spots and the majority of it did. We’ll have to investigate farther to see if we can get the last bit of that off.

Here they are, nice and much cleaner!

Do you have any other tips on how you keep these marks off your pans or what you use to clean them with?