While scrolling through my news feed today ogling the gorgeous baking recipes that proliferate during this time of year, I noticed a striking image of an oven on fire, and a title that warned of impending doom: 'Resist the urge to use this oven setting'. In case you were confused as to what they meant, the subtitle cleared it up by explaining that "The self-clean button opens a portal to hell."

Normally when I read an opinion piece that I do not agree with I just shake my head and move on, but this screed against self-cleaning ovens rankled me. The rest of the afternoon I searched for the reason this so roused my ire. As a baker who uses her oven daily and the self-cleaning oven regularly, I wasn't buying the author's arguments. Her description of what happens when you use the self-clean feature is far from anything I have experienced. "Almost everyone I know has either never used it or used it once and then vowed never to use it again," she proclaims. Huh.

What the hell are these people doing in their ovens? Scratch that, I don't want to know. It's not that I am a neat baker - far from it. I forget to put catch pans under my pies. I put too much batter in my cake pans. I broil fatty things. My oven gets messy and splattered. Yet all I need do is pick up the big chunks and swipe a paper towel across the floor prior to setting the self-clean function, and my oven gets remarkably clean. Yes, I need to do another swipe after the cycle is run, but it is a lot less work than scrubbing a dirty oven with rubber gloves, scrub pads, and stinky cleaner. And I have yet to experience any of the horrifying results enumerated in this article.

It's the sense of entitlement and laziness that irk me. The author's notion that the self-cleaning feature should be some kind of "magic" device is a tell. It sounds like she isn't doing the most basic things you should do before hitting 'self-clean', which every (unread) instruction manual explains. You can't leave huge gobs of goo on the bottom of the oven and expect them to magically disappear. It's not the oven's fault you can't be bothered to read the instructions or perform a bit of tidying beforehand. And instead of running the self-clean oven frequently to keep it from becoming a disaster, she would rather spray noxious chemicals? Wait, wasn't she complaining about the odors?

If I sound a bit curmudgeonly (hey you kids get off my lawn!), I can't help it. This article typifies an area of food writing that annoys me greatly. Find something that you don't like, and even (or especially) if you do not understand it, ridicule it. It's less funny than it is lazy. No one enjoys well-executed snark more than I do, but it works best when you have mastery over the subject and can dig at the underlying ironies. If good snark is a fencer's foil, this article was a caveman's club. And self-cleaning ovens rock.