How to Clean Unglazed Clay Cookware

Unglazed clay has one habit that decides how you clean it: it drinks. The raw, matte surface is porous, so it pulls in whatever liquid touches it. That is the same property that makes a natural clay pot cook the way it does, holding a little water in the wall and giving it back as gentle steam. It is also the reason you keep detergent well away from it.

The short version: wash with hot water and a stiff brush, never washing-up liquid. Reach for a baking-soda paste when food sticks or a smell lingers. Rinse thoroughly, then dry the pot completely before it goes back in the cupboard. Do that after every use and a natural pot will outlast most of the metal pans in your kitchen.

Why you skip the soap

Detergent is built to cling and soak in. On a glazed or sealed surface that is fine, because you rinse it straight off. On unglazed clay it sinks into the pores and stays, and the next time you heat the pot it seeps back out into whatever you are cooking. You end up with a faint soapy note in a dish you spent an hour on. Rinsing does not fully draw it out, because the pores run deeper than the surface you can scrub.

So the no-soap rule is not fussiness. Soap in porous clay is close to a one-way trip. Hot water does the real work anyway: it loosens fat and food and leaves nothing behind that you would rather not eat.

The everyday clean

Let the pot cool on its own first. Clay dislikes a sudden change in temperature, and cold water hitting a hot pot is one of the quickest ways to crack one, which our guide on covers in full. Give it a few minutes to come down before it meets the tap.

Then work through it in order:

• Tip out food scraps with a wooden spoon or spatula rather than a knife edge.
• Run hot water in and scrub with a stiff brush or a non-scratch pad, working with the surface rather than gouging at it.
• For anything baked on, fill the pot with hot water and leave it to soak for ten or fifteen minutes, then come back and brush it loose.

Skip steel wool and metal scourers. They can shed grit into the clay and take the surface with them.

Stubborn spots and lingering odours

For a burnt patch or a greasy ring, mix a couple of tablespoons of baking soda with a little water into a paste. Spread it on the spot, leave it a quarter of an hour, then scrub and rinse. Baking soda is a mild abrasive that neutralises smells at the same time, and unlike detergent it rinses clean away.

For a smell that has settled in, garlic or fish being the usual culprits, fill the pot with hot water, add two tablespoons of baking soda, and let it stand for an hour or overnight before rinsing.

Coarse salt is the other tool worth keeping. Sprinkle it onto the damp surface and scrub with your brush, or with half a lemon or a cut potato. The salt lifts grease and stuck residue by abrasion alone, with nothing chemical to soak in. Rinse well afterwards.

Drying is the step people skip

This is where pots actually go wrong. A pot put away damp is a pot growing mildew in the dark, and because the clay holds moisture inside its wall, “looks dry” is not the same as dry.

After rinsing, shake out the excess and stand the pot somewhere airy, ideally tilted or upside down, with the lid off and set apart. Give it hours, not minutes. Overnight on the draining rack is the safe default. Do not rest a damp lid on a damp pot, and do not seal either one in the cupboard until both are fully dry. If you are in a hurry, you can finish the drying in a barely warm oven, as long as you let the pot heat gradually with it rather than dropping it into an oven already hot.

If a stored pot ever smells musty, that is mildew in the pores. Fill it with hot water and baking soda, soak it, scrub it, rinse, and this time dry it properly.

The patina is meant to happen

An unglazed pot darkens with use. Oil and cooking juices soak into the surface, and over a few months the pale terracotta deepens to brown, unevenly, heaviest where the heat and fat gather. That is seasoning, not dirt. A seasoned pot cooks a little more cleanly and becomes a bit more its own, so leave it be. Do not scrub it back to bare clay and do not bleach it. You would only strip the character and the mild non-stick you spent months building.

The darkening is cosmetic, not a safety question. The natural finish is the one we had independently tested for lead and cadmium migration, with results well below the EU limits (report ), and you can read the detail on the page.

Glazed pots follow different rules

If your pot is glazed, the sealed surface does not drink the way raw clay does. You can use a little mild washing-up liquid on a glazed interior and rinse it off, much like any ceramic dish. It is simply more forgiving day to day.

The dishwasher is a separate question: we recommend hand washing every clay pot, and unglazed pieces, being porous, should never go in it at all. Even where a glaze tolerates it, the heat and the temperature swings of a dishwasher cycle are hard on clay over time, so hand washing is the gentler choice for a pot you want to keep for years.

For a pot that is glazed on one face and bare on the other, treat each face by its own rule: mild soap is fine on the glaze, hot water only on the raw clay.

Storing between uses

Once the pot is genuinely dry, store it with the lid off or propped ajar. A tilted lid, or a folded tea towel laid between pot and lid, keeps air moving and stops damp getting trapped. Keep it in an open cupboard rather than a sealed plastic box. If a pot has sat unused for a while and picks up a cupboard smell, a hot-water and baking-soda soak brings it back before its next outing.

None of this is much work once it is habit. A natural clay pot asks for hot water, a brush, and a proper dry, and it gives you years of cooking in return. If yours is new, the same care starts at the very beginning, which our guide on walks through, and you can see the range it applies to among our .