This was originally published at EZ Vid.
Time To Glove Up
Cooking is a joy for those who love to eat and serve others. The kitchen is considered a cook's domain, their castle, the place where they create feasts for family, friends, and anybody who dares to love food. With that joy also comes a great deal of responsibility and common sense. Working with food requires the use of a lot of equipment, like ovens. Let's face it. Ovens get hot and it can be easy to get burned or singed when removing pots, pans, and other materials during the baking and cooking process. For that reason, you'll need a good pair of oven mitts to maintain the maximum amount of protection from potential burns and splatters. The good news is that there are plenty of options out there to keep you safe.
An oven mitt is an insulated glove (or mitten) that is worn over the hand in the kitchen to protect the skin from severe burns that come from hot foods, heating elements, stoves, or other hazards experienced while cooking.
The majority of oven mitts consist of some amount of heat insulation and are surrounded by heavy-duty cotton fabrics. Premium-quality oven mitts are often treated with silicone, making them resistant to water and stains. They can also be composed of other durable and synthetic materials, like Kevlar and Nomex. Textile gloves with decorative patterns are often machine washable, which makes sense for both the professional and home cook.
The degree of heat protection oven mitts provide really depends on the material from which they're made. Those made from fabric typically protect hands from temperatures up to two hundred degrees Fahrenheit (ninety-three degrees Celsius), whereas those mitts with silicone materials can provide protection up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit (two hundred degrees Celsius).
Certain oven gloves have also been designed with individual finger sockets, making it easier to maintain a strong grip around your kitchenware as opposed to gloves having 2 separate sections for your thumb and remaining 4 fingers.
Many oven gloves are sold individually to offer customized fits for both the left and right hand, but they're also known to come in pairs depending on the brand.
Finally, if you enjoy a lot of bright colors in the kitchen, you'll be excitedly overwhelmed by the number of attractive color combinations and designs you can find on oven mitts. Designs can vary from anything such has hearts, to animals, to cartoon characters. For oven mitts, the sky truly seems to be the limit.
"These gloves are fantastic. I make a lot of dishes in heavy cookware and had such a hard time keeping my grip or moving the large cast iron pots. These are perfect because your whole hand is protected -- no more burns on the top of your hands, while giving you better control over what you are handing than a classic oven mitt. They're also a lifesaver if you are making anything at the top end of the temperature range."
P.J. Larson
"The gloves really work! I used them to remove hot trays from the oven, in addition to not feeling any heat at all the trays didn't slip out of my hand. I was anxious to use them while grilling and they really made the whole experience much easier. I was not worried about getting burned when I was turning the food."
Christine
"Love these gloves! I have small hands and love to bake, so I often run into problems of almost losing my grip on whatever I'm pulling out of the oven. These gloves give me a much better grip on hot cookie trays and pie dishes than the standard oven mitt. It's also a lot easier to grab oddly-shaped dishes with the dexterity of the glove, as opposed to oven mitts where you don't have a lot of control over what you're grabbing."
Madeline
"I do quite a bit of smoking and it can get dicey trying to add wood chips or more water mid-smoke with your bare hands. Using oven mitts really isn't an option due to the dexterity required. These gloves seem to get the job done much better and clean up real nice."
J. Smith