The Best Silicone Tip Tongs

Buying Guide

Whether you’re flipping meat in a pan, tossing a salad or combining the last few ingredients into pasta, having a pair of silicone tip tongs is a great idea. This versatile kitchen tool can help with many cooking tasks without scraping your dishes and leaving unpleasant scratches. Silicone tip tongs have the benefits of powerful stainless steel tongs, but the scalloped tips are covered with a silicone layer. This not only keeps your dishes safe, it also ensures you don’t tear your food while flipping or mixing.

One of the main things to consider when getting silicone tip tongs is what you will use them for. While they are a good choice to use with your non-stick cookware, silicone tip tongs are not made to be used with very high heat. For most silicone tip tongs, you can use them with temperatures up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. However, if you want to flip burgers on a grill, for example, you will likely need metal tongs without a silicone tip as the grill can get much hotter than that. If silicone meets very high heat, it can melt or burn, ruining your tongs. However, if you will be using them with medium heat in the kitchen, they should come in very handy.

A key feature many cooks like to have on their tongs is the ability to lock them closed. This way, they take up much less space and are easier to store in a drawer. Another feature to keep an eye out for is a hole in the top of the tongs for hanging. If you prefer to hang your cooking utensils, then this is a must-have feature.

• It’s important to clean your tongs well, especially if you are using them with raw meat. Most silicone tip tongs are dishwasher safe, so they can be washed and sanitized at a high temperature. Take special care to look at the ends of the tongs and the hard-to-reach places in the mechanism to ensure that no food is stuck in there. If you do find food that you can’t reach, soak the tongs in hot water with dish soap for 20 minutes. This should help loosen any food. You can then use a narrow scrub brush to remove the food.
• Silicone tip tongs come in many colors, unlike plain metal tongs. The silicone is available in red, blue, black, yellow, green and more colors. You can match the silicone with other accent colors in your kitchen. For example, if you have dishes that are red, then getting tongs with red silicone is a nice way to bring everything together.
• Some people get tongs in multiple colors to signify different uses. For example, black tongs are to only be used with raw meat or green tongs are only to be used for salad. This can help reduce cross-contamination in the kitchen if you find yourself cooking multiple dishes at once. With designated colors for each kind of food, you’ll be less likely to use the wrong tongs.
• One of the key benefits of silicone tip tongs is they reduce the amount of heat transfer. With metal tongs, if you’re working with really high heat for a long period of time, the tongs themselves will heat up and will be uncomfortable to hold. However, the silicone helps to reduce heat transfer so you can still handle the tongs without feeling your hands get warm.