Ever Wonder Why Chefs Opt For Towels As Opposed To Oven Mitts?

From "The Bear" to your favorite local restaurant, you may wonder why chefs opt to use towels instead of oven mitts when working in the kitchen. Towels overtake oven mitts in three key areas vital to keeping a chef's operations running like clockwork: cleanliness, disposability, and dexterity.

The first two elements play off of each other. Towels are cleaner than oven mitts because they are both easier to clean and easier to swap out. Unlike some oven mitts, towels don't require any special washer or dryer setting to retain their shape and functionality — just toss it in the washer on whatever setting you prefer. And because towels are so much cheaper and easier to buy and store in bulk, all a chef has to do is select another one from the stack and continue cooking.

Unlike oven mitts, towels protect a chef's hand from heat while still allowing them to get a solid grip on things pulled right out of the oven or to grip a hot pan handle on the stove. Opting for towels over oven mitts offers a ratio of dexterity to heat protection that a chef can adjust on the fly, saving them time and giving them a tailored level of heat protection.

Restaurants need to follow strict sanitation guidelines to maintain a solid health code rating. But maintaining that rating takes time, and if there's one thing a chef working a dinner service hates, it's wasting time.

Chefs can't throw oven mitts over their shoulder or leave them in a stack in an out-of-the-way spot, so using oven mitts means a chef has to waste precious seconds every time they need heat protection to find, put on, and put back the mitts. Compare this to the ease of tossing a kitchen towel over your shoulder, using it as needed, and throwing it in a hamper once dirty, and it's easy to see why towels are so often the heat protection tool of choice for busy chefs.

Additionally, many restaurants employ laundry services that pick up the restaurant's soiled linens and replace them with clean ones. These services deliver towels in sealed, easy-to-stack packaging which is significantly cheaper compared to purchasing and self-laundering a comparable number of oven mitts.

Any chef can tell you that kitchens get dirty. But since no one wants to eat food touched by dirty linens, clean linens must be available at all times. Because affordable laundering services make towels so disposable, chefs don't have to worry about getting them dirty because a fresh replacement is always available.

Because oven mitts are so bulky, they offer second-to-none heat protection. However, gripping something with an oven mitt is like gripping something with a flipper, as four of your fingers can't properly bend and stretch to get around the contours of a hot item. Chefs need not only speed but dexterity to cook, and towels offer the best of both of these worlds. Plus, chefs rarely need all the heat protection an oven mitt provides, and even when they do, they can duplicate that heat protection by layering or folding towels as needed.

Cooking is all about being able to adjust on the fly, and limiting yourself to the grip strength and dexterity of just your thumb and four fingers stuck together makes adjusting difficult. Chefs can tuck a towel through the loop of a casserole dish to secure a solid grip when pulling it from the oven. Chefs can wrap a towel around the handle of a scorching-hot pan, allowing them to get a firm grip to maneuver the pan to their needs.

Outside of heat protection, towels offer a superior level of utility over oven mitts as well. While a chef should never use a damp towel to grip hot pots and pans, damp towels can keep cutting boards from slipping, ensure even cake layers, and are instrumental in making the quintessential sourdough farm loaf.