I find most silicone pot holders and sleeves like this to be too thin. They heat up to fast and I end up getting burned or having to supplement them. So I usually stick to my stand by of a folded kitchen towel. Its as thick or thin as it needs to be, if I start to feel the heat too much I just fold it again. And it does at least a dozen other things, while being generally on or near my person whenever I’m cooking.
It’s a great handle cover. I have a couple of them. But, it can be a bit tricky. If your handle has some grease on it before you put the sleeve on or if some frying grease gets splashed inside, it becomes a real liability. There’s nothing like lifting a pan off the stove only to have it spin around and dump your food on the floor or have the pan squirt out of your hand. Neither of these things happen with a pot holder or towel.
If the problem is the heat transfer through the handle, what about a couple heatsink-like fins brazed to the handle close to the pan itself? Copper should braze to cast iron pretty well with brass or silver-braze.
Things like e.g. glassworking torches use this trick to inhibit heat transfer from the business end to where they should stay cold.
Heat transfer isn’t an issue for me (folded tea-towel FTW) but a frying pan with atomic-age fins would be awesome.
If you can score a copper-alloy computer heatsink, you have the fins prefabbed. The rest is just cutting the piece of the heatsink, grinding a flat on one or two sides of the handle, temporarily attaching the parts together with a wire or screws or in a vise, and then a big-ass torch and a brazing rod. And lots and lots of flux, don’t skimp on that one.
I could see those getting in the way, collecting dirt, etc. Also would it have any effect when the skillet is used in the oven? The only real point to pans that don’t have heat resistant handles is it leaves them oven safe for double duty. Otherwise you could just wrap wood around it and be done with the whole problem.
This seems like a great thing, but what I think I need is a silicone glove that goes halfway up my arm and a heat resistant face shield. Maybe I should just get some firefighter gear for when I make hot water cornbread. It’s delicious, but can be dangerous to make.
Yeah, but if you get the inside of the sleeve greasy you can use it as a poor man’s Fleshlight.
Valid concerns, addressable by proper design. (E.g. trading off efficiency for ease of maintenance, and using coarse wider-spaced fins with plenty of space in between.)
Not much, either way. Very minor impact by the added thermal mass to heat up.
Good point, I was wondering…
A regular welding glove will do a good part of the job. A regular face shield and maybe even just goggles will help greatly during shorter expositions to radiant heat; a welding helmet (without the dark glass, or with nonactivated autodarkening window) would work better but is a major overkill.
Face shield, leather gloves (with a way to avoid spilling hot liquid into the gloves, then they can turn from safety device to a liability, whether it is water, molten tar, or liquid nitrogen), nomex labcoat or suit. Some nomex gear can be found in military surplus, sometimes even those silvery suits.
I nearly bought something similar at Sur la Table until I realized that I hang all my pots and pans from hooks and these have no holes at the end.
You are the person I want to be.
That is what I use. Protects hands and forearms, costs a buck, basically foolproof, and makes me feel I am cooking Science!
I got a sheepskin handle sleeve (with the wool on the inside) at a renaissance fair that works very well and IMMHO is way cooler.
My Kitchen Aid pan came with a (permanent) silicone handle. When it is hot it gets soft and wants to spin as dacree describes (not 180, but enough to dump).
I think you’ll find vintage silicone to be far superior.
Seriously, though, surely silicone’s not the right material for this? Certainly silicone baking stuff seems to heat up pretty quickly.
I was given a cast iron pan (a Wagner?) which came with a padded fabric sleeve (like a miniature oven glove) that fitted over the handle- this works very well, despite looking rather more rustic than silicone.
My ‘trick’ is to first get a job where you work with your hands a lot. Then, build up a tolerance for pain. Also, learn to be very quick when working with the pan.
/I keed!
My silicone handle has fins on the inside, to just keep the handle at a slightly greater distance and reduce the points of contact with the hot pan while maintaining friction.
But it’s good to look for ways to use flux every day. Flux is important.
I had this one Scoutmaster who was a steam engineer in the Navy. He used to just reach his big leathery hands into pots of boiling water when doing KP. I still shiver to think of it.
I think it depends on the form the silicone takes. The baking pads are a much stiffer, denser, type and they’ve got layers of fiberglass running through them. But they still don’t heat up as well as metal, so things baked on silicone don’t brown as deeply. But then regular silicone bake ware seems to be the same stuff as the potholders.
Have had these for years. Don’t put them on until the pot is warm then leave in place until done with cooking eggs or similar.
