The Reason You Should Probably Toss Out Your Oven Mitts

The kitchen might be the heart of any home, but it's also harboring a lot of germs. If you know a thing or two about food safety, you already know that hand-washing is important and not to use knives, cutting boards, and other surfaces for multiple ingredients without cleaning them in between to prevent cross-contamination. But even the cleanest home cooks can overlook some of the germiest spots in the kitchen, including knobs on the stove, refrigerator handles, and the spice rack, which frequently get touched while you're preparing raw meat without washing your hands. 

In fact, one of the dirtiest places in the kitchen isn't a fixed spot — it's your oven mitts.

Oven mitts evoke a warm, fuzzy feeling because they protect you from burning your hands when you're handling a hot pan. (They're also usually pretty cute.) However, for all of their positive attributes, pot holders and oven mitts suffer from multiple food safety problems. Because they only get used for a minute or two at a time, most people don't think to wash them very often, if ever. As a result, your mitts are super-dirty (both inside and out), and they're probably spreading germs around every time you use them.

Oven mitts and pot holders are things nobody really thinks about until it's time to cook. They're tools that only come into play when it's time to move a hot casserole out of the oven or remove a stock pot off of the stove. Only the most fastidious hand-washers take a minute to wash their hands before grabbing an oven mitt. Dirty food hands are shoved into the gloves over and over, leaving germs and bacteria behind.

Because oven mitts almost never get washed, even if you wash your hands a lot while you cook (as you should), you're exposing your hands to whatever is inside your mitts each time you use them. So even if your hands were clean going into the mitt, they're probably dirty coming out.

Oven mitts and pot holders are also oversized and floppy, which by design helps save your skin from coming in contact with hot surfaces. However, the extra bulk of the fluffiness can also flop into your food, which can create a cross contamination issue on the outside of the mitt if it's not washed after you're done cooking. Mitts and pot holders can also pick up germs if you spill ingredients on them when you're prepping, or if you use a pot holder as a trivet for saving a countertop or table surface.

If you ever have a chance to take a peek into a commercial kitchen, take notice of the lack of pot holders and oven mitts. This is because chefs and line cooks don't use them. Food safety is very important in restaurant kitchens, and chefs know how dirty oven mitts and pot holders can get. Oven mitts aren't foolproof, either. And when used over and over again, they can wear down and split open, exposing hands to hot pot handles. No chef can afford to lose a cook in the middle of service — especially during the ongoing labor crisis.

Instead of using pot holders or oven mitts, professional cooks use dry, folded kitchen towels. They're cheap, and every kitchen has a linen service that washes and sanitizes them between uses. Towels also have a little bit of a tackier surface area than oven mitts (even the silicone ones), which gives you more control over whatever hot thing you're grabbing. All you need to do is fold a standard kitchen or dish towel in fourths or eighths and then use them like a pre-made pot holder. 

Just make sure your towels are dry — the moisture will conduct the heat, and you'll burn your hands. After you're done cooking, toss your towels in with your regular laundry. You'll never have to worry about spreading germs — at least from your pot holders — again.