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How To Clean Grease Oven Gloves

Your oven mitts are disgusting. Smell them. Take a good deep sniff. Unless you bought them yesterday, I would wager they have the terroir of a superfund site next to a lake of rancid grease. When Emma Laperruque, the editor of this piece, was soliciting opinions about oven mitts from the BA staff, I described them as smelling like a gym locker used to age Alpine cheeses, and I like to think that analogy won me this assignment.

“But oven mitts protect my hands,” you say. When was the last time you saw a surgeon operate wearing a comforter on each arm? In fact, oven mitts make it hard to feel anything you touch. They reduce the dexterity of your hands. And they are so cumbersome, chances are you’ll need two mitts to remove anything from the oven, making you more likely to burn an unprotected elbow as you reach in with both arms splayed out.

Instead, use what professional cooks, including the ones in our test kitchen, use: a dry towel folded into quarters or eighths (depending on the thickness of the material). A folded towel provides ample heat protection, without mitigating your hands’ ability to wrap around objects and receive sensory feedback from them. Grabbing the edge of a rimmed baking sheet or top of a cake pan requires precision. So many baking pans are now nonstick, a.k.a. slippery, and a cotton towel provides friction right where you need it. The thumb of an oven mitt is more likely to dip into the juices in a roasting pan or plunge into the top of a cake, because your hand can’t tell where the mitt ends until scorching liquid wicks its way toward your skin.

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The most likely moment for you to burn yourself isn’t when you are reaching in and out of the oven. It’s when you set something hot on the stovetop or resting rack, and then two minutes later forget that it is still hot and grab it. A folded towel drapes easily over a skillet handle to remind you of the danger. Mitts don’t drape or easily stay in place on a skinny handle. And besides, how are you planning to get those potatoes out of the oven with your mitts tied up elsewhere?

Once your lovely dry towel is stained, wet, or getting funky, just throw it in the wash. Most can be laundered indefinitely, and can become cleaning rags when they become so stained they start to bring down the real estate value of your kitchen. Chances are you aren’t washing those dirty mitts because you have hot things to hold and aren’t about to let them decide when laundry day is.

And don’t get me started on silicone: Yes, I know about those grabby things, and no, they are not any better. No matter the material or style, an oven mitt is an all-or-nothing approach, incapable of nuance, as efficient as climbing a ladder while inside a sleeping bag. It might protect you some of the time but if you fall it is still a long way down.

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