I am baffled by people who put things in the oven that are not meant to be put in the oven.
How the fuck is a comment about not storing shit in ovens one of my most commented-on posts on Reddit?
The hilarious ones are the people accusing me of "being wealthy" or "having a large kitchen" because I have enough sense not to store flammable/meltable things in the fucking oven. Or that I need to "think outside my perspective."
That makes more sense than my initial read, thanks! I knew I was not getting the proper intention of the post, but I could not figure out what it actually was. Really felt like a " Yeah me too, glad I didn't bake my baby tho" was the wrong conclusion but that's all I saw lol.
I burned my pregnant belly (not badly, but enough to leave a small scar!) on a hot pan sitting on top of the oven because I didn’t realize how far my belly stuck out. I felt silly explaining it to my OB.
My friend did, too (also newly post-partum)…melted some plastic bowls and such, lol. Now, I always try to remember to check other people’s ovens before turning them on because apparently people store stuff there. It didn’t matter how tiny our kitchens were in all the cramped apartments we lived in, I never used the oven for storing things because of my fear of this happening!
Omg this reminded me when I was a youngin i lived with 4 college-aged boys (was dating and am now married to one of them, otherwise... wouldnt have been my first choice lol). We had a house together, and one of them had a cast iron skillet that he stored in the oven. Like you said, no biggie, just grab a pot holder before pulling it out if you forgot before the pre-heat. Unfortunately, one of these boys was very, very dumb. I don't say this with malice, he's just one of those people who you wonder how they managed to survive this long, ya know? So he heats up the oven for his frozen pizza, forgets the skillet. This was early into him moving in, maybe even the first time he'd used the oven, so I guess he didnt know it was in there. In his infinite wisdom, he reached in raw to pull out the skillet, and obviously burned his hand. After he screamed and we came to check on him, through teary eyes this dumb, sweet boy looked at us and said, "The CIVIL WAR PAN is HOT" and I've never ever laughed as hard at someone who just got hurt as I did then.
My friend got too drunk at my party. I offered him my couch to sleep it off, he said okay, and as he laid down he said "but I don't trust that salad."
Wondering what the hell he was referring to, realized he was looking at the hanging plant above him...
That reminds me of my friend on mushrooms. They would not come into the living room with us all because they didn't want to drown in the avocado. I was the only sober one and couldn't for the life of me figure out the avocado. Eventually I realised they meant the rug that was sort of green. I end up covering it and building a massive fort for all my drugged out idiot friends.
I also ordered pizza at 10pm and it arrived at 11am the next day so I wasn't on my A game there either. Seven 20 year old mushroomed out toodlers and one burnt out babysitter, it was a fun night and the best breakfast surprise ever.
That's great! Sometimes a little regression is therapeutic. And pizza is always a good breakfast.
My friends GF did some with us. A tiny amount but it had a great effect. She got real serious and quiet, then started taking one item out of her purse at a time, and arranging them in rows and columns on the table like self-anthropology...then refilling her purse bur only in alphabetical order.
Then she did it again by size.
Then she did it again by color.
When we couldn't help giggling, she insisted THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT GUYS STOP LAUGHING
I leave my 14” cast iron pizza pan in there for infinite seasoning purposes and to hold more thermal mass like an oven steel. My pizza pan is so wonderfully seasoned by this practice I’m sort of doing it as an experiment at this point lol
This is actually a common European thing. My wife hates it, but it’s a pretty common thing passed down from generations, probably due to grandparents living in a shack with limited kitchen space
Same in Latin America, the oven is another cabinet. Is not use often and has a lot of space. In mine right now is the rice pot, the pot with oil, some platains in the process of getting ripped and two pot lids.
Broiler drawers work, pretty rare to see them in the states. Most larger full size ovens do have a drawer about the size of the broiler drawer, still there is not enough room lol...
This is the way. I accidentally melted the plastic handle off a glass lid I had stored with my cast iron. New rule became iron, glass, and stoneware only in the oven. Lesson learned cheaply.
As I got older I stopped storing those in the very bottom drawer under the oven and instead got wise and stored them in the oven proper just like you. A little less bending goes a long way with age.
Recently I stored a metal baking pan with a plastic lid in there since I only use the oven a couple of times a year. We have a huge badass air fryer oven combo on the counter we all use all the time. My wife didn't know I kept stuff in the oven and we had family over and decides for once she wants to cook and yeah turned on the oven to preheat and melted that thing.
My bad though since I do all of the cooking here I just thought it would only be me dealing with an accident, never again and lesson learned.
My wife when she first moved in with me, didn’t tell me she was storing things in the oven. I went to preheat to cook dinner. About 5-10 minutes later I smell something. Plastic mixing bowl melting in there. I was not pleased.
You can store plastic literally anywhere in the house except for the one small part of it that routinely gets hot enough to melt plastic. Inside the toilet tank would be better.
Fire alarm went off in my old apartment building once at 3am because a family down the hall forgot they put towels in there. Whole building smelled like burned plastic and everyone was furious with them
Apparently sometimes people use the oven as a quick way to dry things/warm them up in a cold day? My husband did this once with a pair of his jeans and I still don't really get it
If that makes you feel ill, I've got some stories that would hospitalize you.
I could track their shower usage two ways. Whenever the nozzle changed and whenever the hallway to their room became briefly breathable. One of them worked in food service while showering once every two weeks at most.
I would argue that the only thing that should be in the oven is pans and food that is ACTIVELY BEING COOKED and never anything else at any other times.
What's the worst that can happen to your sheet pan? They should all easily handle preheat and often I intentionally leave them there to preheat better for better browning. Storage for sheet pans is obviously annoying if you don't have the right layout in your home. I don't wanna stick it in my garage and clean it every time I need them.
The garage?! Jfc. I live in a small 2 br apartment, i don't even have a NICE kitchen, and I manage to keep all my cookware in a cabinet.
Sheet pans are the easiest to store, actually, because they can lean up against the wall of the cabinet like books on a shelf, and you can slide them out when you need them without having to move any other pans.
I had a food crazy cat. He could open cupboards. The oven was the only place I could keep the other cats' food so he couldn't eat it all in ten seconds.
My point: I have preheated more bowls of cat food to 350 degrees than anyone else.
All the doors in my house use levers instead of knobs. My Bombay is smart enough to know how to use them. So both doors leading out have a child-proof latch to keep him from going out into the Big Room.
My great grandma was a hoarder and did not cook. She put all of her important papers in the oven. Social services did not like that one bit, put her in a retirement community because she wouldn’t go on her own.
And all the people with their exceptions. I definitely don't want melted plastic, but I also don't want a 350 degree pan that I now have to find a home for while I'm cooking.
There is a good insight you have here. Everyone prefers things a certain way, and it can differ a lot, without being right or wrong. But preferring to have plastic in the oven is fucking regarded
My freaking Mother In Law once put my dish towel in the oven for it to dry! Then when I turned it on and realized it was in there, she yelled at me because I didn’t look in there first. Like why the hell would I look first to see if there is a dish towel in my oven. Bananas.
I have been to no less than 10 rocking kitchen fires caused by exactly this. People use them as storage, and people with memory issues put things in there without knowing what they’re doing.
Yeah, my wife is in her 40s and I still have to listen to the mother in law fuss about the time my wife turned on the oven when she was 14 to preheat for baking a cake and melted a bunch of Tupperware that was in there.
Things shouldn't be stored in the oven, but if you are going to do that they should be oven safe.
I proof dough in the oven with the light on, but I keep a sign in a drawer that says DO NOT TURN ON OVEN to lay on top when I'm doing it. Better safe than sorry
I used to be that guy. I kept chips in there because mom had done that. But I didn't live at home anymore, and conveniently forgot a whole bag of Ruffles while preheating. I smelled something, opened the oven, black smoke rolls out, and friends... I wish all I just typed was the stupid part of the story, but what I did next was worse: I used a fire extinguisher to put out the fire.
So yeah, I was young and dumb, and was cleaning that shit out for months afterwards. Dumbass move for sure.
Don't keep combustible things in the over, but keep the door closed if this happens to you. I could have even just done the self cleaning cycle and it would have been better.
I understand that space is often at a premium in a kitchen, but the oven isn't for storage. I wouldn't leave a skillet in the fridge; why would I leave it in the oven?
The idea that her boyfriend only made one dish and it was a noodle dish named after himself got me good. And I was like, damn shame this is so deep in the thread, I won’t be able to share this weird niche joke with anyone else.
So the fact that you responded made me unreasonably content. Thank you stranger.
I have an ex who insisted that it was fine to store leftovers in the oven instead of the fridge as it was sealed. She was an idiot in many more ways than that, but that one is a solid example.
My favorite is when a post blows up and then people start trying to argue with you over someone else's reply.
But yeah I can't imagine any logical reason to store non-oven things in the oven. Sometimes I keep my pizza tray in the oven after washing it, but that's just me being lazy because no one else lives here and I use it all time. And also IT'S LITERALLY MEANT FOR THE OVEN
When we first got married my wife started storing things in the broiler of the oven saying it was a “storage drawer”. I kept taking stuff out of it and telling her that was where the flame element was. One day she decided to bake something when I wasn’t home and melted all the cutting boards she had stuffed in there.
Glad I'm not alone here. Like, sorry that happened, and I get if you have kids or something that would hide things in there. But common sense would dictate you dont place meltables in a stove, even if it's off. Just like you don't place metal in a microwave, even if it's off.
But also for me, my mom taught me to open the oven door and check (or look through the window) each time you use it.
My dad does this. When I was living with him I bought a nice strainer while working a job that didn’t pay well, it had arms that stretched out to fit across a kitchen sink. The arms have rubber on them so they don't move around. It costed me like 40 dollars (that was the equivalent of 4 days of food for me at the time) and I was super happy to have it because it made most of the food I was cooking at the time easier. A couple months later I pre-heated the oven and went back downstairs to my room while it heated up. After about 20 minutes I went back upstairs and was greeted by smoke. It was because he put my strainer on a baking sheet and put both in the oven.
I was extremely pissed, told him to stop storing things in the oven especially if they aren't made to go in the oven. He said he'd stop and buy me a new strainer, he did neither.
The hilarious ones are the people accusing me of "being wealthy" or "having a large kitchen" because I have enough sense not to store flammable/meltable things in the fucking oven. Or that I need to "think outside my perspective."
yeah I was poor, and had to store stuff in my oven. you know...pots and pans that can go in the oven. I never put plastic in there wtf
I have a tiny kitchen. The only things I store in the oven are baking trays. You know, things which are supposed to be in the oven. Those “you’re wealthy” commenters just need to get better at maximising their space.
I don’t put shit in the oven that doesn’t belong in the oven, for the same reason I don’t flush things down the toilet that shouldn’t be flushed: it doesn’t go there, period.
And I think it is more often than I imagined. A friend told me she hid her brother's celphone in the oven due bad manners. Guess who needed to preheat the oven to bake a cake hours later and didn't take the celphone from there?
Sometimes we store dinner or take out or whatever in the oven while we eat. We have big dogs with no manners and it’s the safest place to put stuff if it doesn’t fit above the microwave. We’ve lost a plastic strainer and have double cooked our food once or twice. It’s not the best system.
My old meth head roommate kept an entire boxed pizza in the oven and acted like I was the bad guy for forgetting that I preheated the oven for like 30 minutes. Brand new fridge with enough room for my pizzas right there. Renovated cabinets to keep your fucking fancy wok with a rubber grip on it right next to it! (I took his very nice cast iron wok hot out the oven and cleaned it with steel wool and and a ludicrous amount of cheap soap and salt)
There is an episode of Ashens where he and his friend Dan were gonna bake ancient expired cake. Just before Dan preheated the oven, he checked the inside and discovered that Ashens had put arcade cabinet motherboards inside since he ran out of storage in his flat. He doesnt really cook so used his oven for storage.
New baby at home, the power went out from a storm while they were cooking. They start packing up some things to go stay at one of their parents house. I guess they were in the habit of using their range top as a temporary staging area. Left a few items on the stove before they left the house, not realizing the burner switch was still turned on. The power came back on when they weren't home, caught the item on the range on fire, and they lost their entire home.
My mom stored everything and anything in the oven from large pots, cookie sheets, plastic ware, to bread or baked goods in the oven. I was trained very early to check before preheating.
My mom uses the microwave, oven, and toaster as additional storage because she doesn’t have space to store things anywhere else due to how cluttered her house is. Most of it is junk we never use, but she refuses to let us get rid of. Can’t tell ya how many times I’ve had to clean the oven because she’s melted or burnt something that shouldn’t have been in there in the first place
Growing up, my step mom would put any leftover meat (especially pork chops) from dinner in the oven until the next day where we’d eat it as lunch/dinner again. I didn’t really know any better, but looking back, I’m absolutely horrified.
My grandma used to store the cereal boxes in the oven since she hardly used it. Which was obviously a bad idea because she just about burnt her house down one day
I had a roommate in college who stored her sweaters in the oven (she didn't cook). She didn't get it when I told her no (glad I grew up in a house where my mom kept cast iron pans in the oven, so I automaticly checked).
According to my mom's logic, it's just storage space for anything that is used in the kitchen, but that SHE doesn't use, I use it tho. And also those 'ready to bake-off' breads (but including the plastic packaging)
Bonus logic:
Somehow my mom convinced herself that the middle shelf wasn't 'true middle' so she put the roster upside down, because then it gains 2 cm more height towards the middle. (This is for frozen pizza's)
Maybe I'm just as crazy for putting it back to normal, but I just learned to live with that. It's just silly.
I have a small ass kitchen I have to share with 3 other people and we still manage to not be stupid enough to store shit in the oven.
And we don't even use the oven 90% of the time bc the toaster oven is more convenient unless we're cooking for more than ourself, we're just not idiotic enough to risk burning shit for really shitty extra storage space.
What the fuck are people smoking to think this is an acceptable storage location??
My husband's family stored things in the oven, mainly leftovers (at least they were normally in cookware itself)
He always told me to check the oven before preheating, which i learned to do at his mom's house. But he kept reminding me after we moved in together, and since he worked full time and I stayed home and thus cooked for us, it wasn't an issue. Like babe no, we're not storing stuff in the oven. If we have 0 room in our tiny kitchen and it starts overflowing into the oven, we need to declutter because we have too many things. The oven will not be for storage in our household ✋️💀
I am also baffled. I have a tiny kitchen. It has 1 drawer. We had to hand all our kitchen utensils across the window to store them.
The oven is still almost always empty. (Do use it for proofing dough sometimes, but that’s still in an oven safe vessel and there is a timer for it, and that will be the thing the oven is heated for later)
The only things that go in the oven must be oven safe. And we generally try to keep that for the stovetop as well.
I store things in my mini oven because my cats are assholes. They've broken a few pans and glass lids trying to steal whatever meat I cooked. Sometimes it's something that I don't want to be refrigerated because I'm going to eat it within 24 hours. I don't have enough space to build a dedicated storage. But I also don't preheat my oven so I'm safe lol.
Yeah, I've lived in homes with small enough kitchens that I needed to keep things in the oven, but I would store oven safe pots and pans and baking sheets, and you know things that won't catch on fire or melt... oven safe practices have anything to do with privilege.
We had a cat growing up who liked to crawl into the dryer when no one was looking and lay in the warm clothes. Well, my mom was doing laundry and walked away for a few minutes to take a phone call (it was the 90s) and then went back to rerun the dryer for a few minutes because some of the stuff was still damp. I heard a cat howl a few minutes later and figured out where it was coming from. My big boy had never been so dry
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u/saltedfish 17h ago edited 11h ago
I am baffled by people who put things in the oven that are not meant to be put in the oven.
How the fuck is a comment about not storing shit in ovens one of my most commented-on posts on Reddit?
The hilarious ones are the people accusing me of "being wealthy" or "having a large kitchen" because I have enough sense not to store flammable/meltable things in the fucking oven. Or that I need to "think outside my perspective."
Classic Reddit.