Quite a few years ago my husband bought me a set of white Corning-ware casserole dishes. I have four of these casseroles, two are oval and two are round. While I love these dishes, I have found it extremely difficult to remove them from an oven because there are no handles on the sides or ends. I have only used homemade pot holders when taking these out of the oven, and a few times I almost dropped my hot meals onto my kitchen floor.
Well, I have the answer to the poor design of my casseroles! Duncan’s Kitchen Grips Oven Mitts! It seems that whenever I need a specialty type kitchen product, I can find it at my local Bed Bath and Beyond store, and that is exactly where I found these oven mitts.
Duncan’s Kitchen Grips Oven Mitts are made of a thick and durable material that consists of 85% synthetic rubber and 15% nylon, but they remind me of our neoprene fishing waders. Not only do these mitts protect my hands from being burned when I take anything out of my oven, but the material itself gives me a non-slip hold on my casseroles!
These look like the shape of an over-sized mitten, with a large round finger area and a large thumb area. The outside edges of the oven mitts are sewn in a blanket style stitch, so you see the stitching. I think if they had the seams inside of the gloves, it might be too bulky and uncomfortable. So while the outside stitching is not the most pleasant to look at, I understand why the company designed the mitts this way.
Colors choices are limited to three, black, gray and red. They protect the hands from temperatures up to 500 degrees F, and will also protect the hands in temperatures that fall below freezing. They are thick enough that they have a nice cushion to them, and I have found other uses around the home than for just using these to remove items from a hot oven.
When I defrost our freezer, my hands always get terribly cold, but I can use these Kitchen Grips Oven Mitts and they don’t get cold. In the past I would wear thin stretchy cloth gloves, but these became wet, and I don’t have to worry about that with the Kitchen Grips because they are water resistant. If you get any kind of foods on them, simply run them under the kitchen faucet and the foods wash right off.
One last tip for using these oven mitts is while fishing. The State of Alaska has now come up with a law that when you catch salmon by dip-netting, you have to snip off the fins. Do you know how hard it is to hold a slimy salmon so you can snip the fins? It is not easy, but these mitts really help protect the hands and give you a firm grip on the salmon so you can do the job faster. They also help to hold the salmon while we are cutting them into fillets. I have even heard of folks using these to give them a firm grip on a bottle so they can remove a stuck on cap. I would suspect that there are many more uses for these Kitchen Grips Oven Mitts, and I am just learning what they are capable of.
And did you ever own a set of oven mittens or pot holders that could be washed by throwing them into your dishwasher? Well, now you can! The Duncan’s Kitchen Grips Oven Mitts can be cleaned by adding them to the top shelf of a dishwasher.
The size of the mitts is 7 1/2 inches wide by 12 inches long, and each set comes with one right and one left handed mitt. The set retails for $22.99 locally, but the Bed Bath and Beyond sells them for a few dollars less (but then you have the shipping to pay, so the store price is fine with me).
