This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 8:02 am and is filed under Canning, Food Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
When you are checking through the list of items you have ready to tackle that next big canning project, pause for a moment when you come to the kitchen mitts. Actually, pause for a moment even if it is a small canning project.
Home canning shouldn’t raise many safety concerns, but there are a few, and one of them centers on the fact that you will be working with some very hot items. Jar lifters, kitchen tongs and the like lessen the likelihood that you will be coming into contact with those hot items, but a good pair of oven mitts constitutes a good addition to that safety equipment.
Be careful, though. A nice pair of quilted, thickly padded mitts looks nice and works well with the dry heat of your oven. They also can work well with your pressure or water bath canner. Here, however, you are working with very hot liquids, and those hot liquids can very quickly soak into those fabric oven mitts and render them ineffective.
There is something relatively new on the market — silicone oven mitts. They can protect you from very high heat, and, as a bonus, are waterproof. That makes them ideal for home canning. In fact, they are also great for working with hot oils which gives you another reason for considering their use in your kitchen.
They may not be as pretty as those fabric mitts, but, when it comes to safety, does that really matter?