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How to Give Your Kitchen Tongs More Grip

How to Give Your Kitchen Tongs More Grip
Credit: Claire Lower

Removing glass jars from hot water, be it a boiling canning bath or a lower-temp sous-vide situation, always feels a little dangerous. The concern, of course, is dropping the jar. Even if it doesn’t break, dropping a jar from any height can cause the hot water to splash, and hot water has been known to burn human flesh. To avoid all this pain and suffering, you just need to make the tongs more grippy, and you can do this easily with rubber bands.

Even if you don’t work with hot, wet jars, a pair of rubber banded tongs can help you grab hot ramekins of crème brûlée, or baked eggs from the basket of your air fryer. Cook’s Illustrated uses any old rubber band for this task, but I like to wrap the end of my tongs in the thick, blue bands that come wrapped around broccoli stalks.

These bands are thicker and, due to their swole nature, less likely to break when submerged in hot water, or exposed to hot porcelain. They last much longer than sad, puny office-style rubber bands, plus they came wrapped around food, which means they are food safe. Really, I do not know a better rubber band.

Just wrap it around the both ends of your tongs (see the photo above for reference), then grab and grip with confidence. If you want more things to wrap your bands around, try using one to open a jar, or as a wallet. (Do, however, replace the band if it starts to lose its snap. I’d hate for you to lose your credit cards.)