Many of us feel that a tea towel or cloth is all that we need to retrieve a hot pan from the oven, but for professional kitchens and cooking enthusiasts, this simply won't cut it. Oven gloves are gloves designed to be used to handle hot items, perfect for people working in the food industry and also for other businesses that utilise ovens. Naturally, they’re usually used to get things in and out of ovens either at home or in professional kitchens, but it doesn't end there.
However, oven gloves aren’t just used to get dinner out of the oven. Many labs use high-temperature oven gloves to help with their experiments, and to protect against very high temperatures. Some oven and heat resistant gloves can even resist contact with temperatures of up to 500°C!
There are two main shapes that oven gloves take: gloves and mitts. We'll provide a short breakdown of their pros and cons:
Gloves - This shape of oven glove is usually referred to as an "oven glove with fingers". Predictably, this style of oven glove features five dedicated fingers, providing a great deal more dexterity than the traditional oven glove design. This makes them perfect for handling hot items with complex shapes and for performing intricate tasks with hot objects.
Mitts - This is commonly known as the traditional oven glove design, and provides general protection that doesn't allow for individual finger movement. These are much more limited in what they can safely and securely hold, however, because they are less complex a design they can provide a higher temperature resistance than some gloves with fingers.
