Say Goodbye To Grease With These Cleaning Tricks For Your Fryer Baskets

When you're in the mood for something homemade and perfectly crispy, there's no better option than a fryer. But cleaning it up afterward can be a real pain — if any place in your kitchen is going to end up greasy and full of crumbs, it's your fryer basket. Whether you're using a traditional deep fryer or an air fryer, you can say goodbye to grease with a few key cleaning ingredients: dish soap, vinegar, and baking soda.

Ideally, clean your fryer every time you use it. It's easy to say "next time" until your fryer basket has a cooked-on layer of grime and grease. Not only is that unappealing to look at, but it can affect the flavor of your foods, cause them to come out too greasy, or the fryer's performance over time. And the longer you let grease and food particles sit, the harder they are to get off.

Try to at least wipe down your fryer basket with each use, with a weekly deep clean in between. With air fryers, you can also invest in liners to save yourself some trouble. A common TikTok hack for cleaning an air fryer basket is to fill it with water and a cleaning solution and then turn it on to heat it. However, this isn't as effective as other methods and not safe. Here are three better ways to get your fryer baskets back into good shape with simple cleaning ingredients and a little scrubbing.

After wiping solid bits and crumbs off the fryer basket with a paper towel, you have a few options. The first is good old dish soap. Submerge the entire basket in warm, soapy water then scrub it with a sponge or brush. If necessary, let the basket soak for a while. The second option is vinegar, which softens grease. Dilute vinegar with water, dip a cloth in the solution, and wipe the basket down before scrubbing; or soak the basket in diluted vinegar for 15 minutes, then clean and rinse. The last option is baking soda, another powerful ingredient for cutting through grease due to its alkalinity. Mix it into a paste with water, apply, and let it sit, then clean. 

Some people also like to combine these cleaning ingredients for extra degreasing power. For example, scrub the basket with soapy water before following up with a baking soda paste, or vinegar into your soapy soaking solution. Some fryer baskets are also dishwasher safe, so check your manual to see if you can save yourself some time. 

After you're done cleaning, rinse the basket of any cleaning products and allow it to fully dry before using it again, as a wet basket can cause oil to splatter out of a deep fryer. Although air fryers don't involve submerging your food in oil, it's still important to dry the basket thoroughly, as moisture can lead to bacterial growth.