Even good cooks burn the food in their pans on occasion, and when this happens, getting your pots and pans clean can be a pain in the neck. While we often focus on cleaning the inside of our pans, because that’s where we put the food, after all, it’s important not to forget to clean the bottoms of our pots and pans.

Yes, we know, the bottoms of pots and pans can be out of sight out of mind, and they can be even harder to get clean than the inside of our pots and pans, but still, they’re not really clean until they’re really clean. Know what we mean?

We have more than one pan with unsightly brown burn marks on the bottom, but not for long. Melissa Maker of Clean My Space has come to the rescue. She experimented with four different ways to clean the bottoms of pots and pans to see once and for all what really works best.

In the video, Maker shows us the brown burn marks on the bottoms of her pans, and then shows us the four methods she is going to use to try to clean them. The first method is ketchup. You probably have that in your refrigerator right now. It sounds like a crazy method, but some people say it works, so why not try it? The second method is using Barkeepers Friend. You may not have this in your pantry, but if it works, you might want to pick some up. The other two methods do involve common pantry staples: cream of tartar and baking soda.

In the end, Maker finds two very effective ways to clean the bottoms of pots and pans, but she does pick a favorite. She also points out that there are some pans that just can’t be cleaned. She even shows us a burnt pan that she picked up at a thrift store specifically for the purpose of trying to clean it, but nothing worked. While most pans can be cleaned, this pan was not one of them.

Watch the video below to see Maker test out four ways to clean the bottoms of pots and pans and to find out which two methods really work.

It’s amazing how clean the bottoms of her pots and pans were after these cleaning methods. We didn’t even know it was possible to make our pots and pans look new again. Now we have no excuse for not cleaning our pots and pans.

Do the bottoms of your pots and pans need to be cleaned? Which cleaning method are you going to try? If your pans are burnt as badly as the thrift store pan in this video, are you going to keep it or toss it if you can’t get it clean?