Oven Gloves

Choosing the Perfect Oven Gloves for Your Home Cooking Adventures

Oven gloves are a common feature in just about every kitchen. If you have an oven, you need something to protect your hands when you pull those steaming, hot dishes out. But as essential and common as they are, few people actually take the time to research and find the best oven gloves.

Did you know there are many different kinds of oven gloves—and some are definitely better than others? If you’ve been living your life just choosing whatever’s cheapest or whatever oven gloves you see first at the store, you’ve been doing it wrong.

Oven Gloves

In this article, we’ll talk about all kinds of different oven gloves, their unique benefits and drawbacks, and give you a few tips for choosing the best oven gloves for your needs.

Types of Oven Gloves

The most important quality you’ll want in a pair of oven gloves is protection from heat. If you don’t have heat resistant oven gloves, you’ve just wasted your money. The traditional fabric gloves are often coated with a flame retardant coating that prevents them from melting, catching on fire, or otherwise failing to do their main job of keeping your hands safe from the heat.

Different Types Of Oven Gloves And Their Key Advantages

But even if the gloves are protected from damage by heat, that doesn’t always mean the gloves are high quality enough to protect your hands from high temperatures. If you’ve ever had the need to use additional protection (like a kitchen towel or potholders) because the temperatures still hurt your hands, you need new gloves.

Putting Cookies in Oven With Oven Gloves
  • Cotton oven gloves. This is probably the most widely used kind of oven glove. They are made of cotton coated in a flame retardant sealant and come in a wide variety of different patterns, colors, and styles. They are convenient because they can be washed in a washing machine. However, they don’t do much good at keeping the high temperatures away from your hands for extended periods. So the heat will quickly hurt your hands if you hold it for more than a few seconds.
  • Rubber oven gloves. These are usually made from neoprene and can protect your hands from significantly higher temperatures than their cotton counterparts. To be exact, a cotton (or other fabric glove) can withstand temperatures of around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. A rubber oven glove, on the other hand, can handle as much as 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike fabric gloves, however, rubber is not as comfortable. They aren’t very breathable. If your hands get sweaty (as they can when dealing with the heat of the oven), the rubber can stick which is not painful but certainly can be annoying. However, they do offer a great grip which means much lower risk of slippage.
  • Silicone oven gloves. Silicone is one of the best materials to use for gloves. It’s more flexible than rubber and more heat resistant than both fabric and rubber. It can withstand up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a super durable material and you can even find silicone oven gloves with fingers that give you an even greater range of movement. This is by far one of the most versatile, resilient, and durable material you could use for oven gloves and the various designs available with this material allow you to find exactly the right glove (or pair of gloves) to suit your home cooking needs.

Tips For Shopping For Oven Gloves

After reading about these different, you’re probably kicking yourself for suffering with low quality oven gloves for so long. Here are a few tips for choosing a quality pair that will last you for the years and years of delicious baking and roasting to come:

Putting Bread In The Oven
  • Consider the material. Cotton is a very common textile but as you can see, silicone and rubber are also available and do have distinct advantages. Cotton is a little more comfortable but the silicone and rubber tend to be more effective.
  • Consider the design. Do you want a mitten style glove, a potholder, a modified towel design or a glove with individual fingers? As you can see from earlier in this article, each design has its advantages. Choose based on your experience in the kitchen in the past. What are the most common problems or inconveniences you experience with your old oven gloves? When you buy new, get ones that address those problems.
  • Single or double. Most gloves are sold as a single item but you can find double oven gloves (both connected and unconnected). We recommend the double oven gloves because being able to hold the dish with both hands is more secure and distributes the pressure of the dish more evenly.
  • Don’t be too stingy. Remember, a high quality pair of gloves will last you a very long time. While some may seem a little high price for what they are, just keep in mind that you won’t have to replace them for a very, very long time. So it’s better to invest in quality now so that you can save money in the long run.
Chopping Turkey With Oven Gloves on Hands

Final Word

As you can see, the possibilities are far greater than you might have ever imagined. You don’t need to deal with low quality oven gloves that work poorly just because you don’t think there’s anything better out there. Now you can choose an affordable, high quality glove (or pair of gloves) that perfectly suits your needs in the kitchen. Now bake away!

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