What Are the Best Kitchen Towels?

Created: Wednesday, 03 March 2021 16:57

As a professional restaurant owner, you go through plenty of kitchen towels in a day, regardless of your business' size. Even as a homeowner, you may find yourself using a couple of dishcloths as you prepare and clean up from meals. All that use means you need the right linens. So what are the best kitchen towels? Discover your options below, plus learn what to consider when choosing your perfect dish towels.

What Do You Use Towels for in the Kitchen?

Thinking about what you'll use linens for in this space will help you determine the best kitchen towels. While you might reach for these linens every day, you may not have considered much about how you use them. Dish towels are practical in residential and commercial places for tasks like these.

• Drying dishes: This purpose for dish towels is among the most common, especially for homes. If you often use these cloths for drying dishes, you'll want one in an easy-to-manage size that can still cover larger pots' and pans' surface area.
• Drying your hands: You might use kitchen towels to dry your hands after washing them regularly before, during and after food prep. A softer, absorbent linen will do well for those purposes.
• Cleaning spills: Spills happen in commercial and home kitchens alike. You'll need dishcloths that can absorb the smallest splashes to the messiest spills to keep your kitchen clean.
• Wiping counters and tables: From the kitchen to the dining area, these spaces have surfaces you need to clean and dry often. Whether you're a restaurant owner or a homeowner, you may use dish towels to wipe and dry these surfaces.
• Cleaning plates for presentation: Some restaurant chefs use a clean kitchen towel when plating dishes to make the presentation look more attractive and appetizing. These towels should be easy to clean and small enough to manage for this purpose.
• Grabbing or setting down hot items: In a pinch, some kitchen workers reach for a dish towel to grab a hot item or to use as a potholder. While using oven mitts and other items made to contact hot pots and pans is safer, a thick kitchen towel can be useful. Just ensure it's dry before grabbing something hot to avoid steam burns.

If you don't already use dish towels for those and other purposes, consider making the switch. Choose the best dish towels to get various uses in your professional or home kitchen and save by cutting down on your use of paper towels and other disposable alternatives.

Qualities of the Best Kitchen Towels

With your purposes in mind, you should also consider the qualities that make the best dish towels. Picking high-quality linens will help you save money and time, since you won't have to replace them often. To get the best for your home or professional kitchen, choose linens with these qualities.

• A durable construction: As a restaurant owner, you know how many towels you can go through in one day. You need towels that can withstand your demands and everyday laundering. Even as a homeowner, your dish towels will likely see plenty of use, so you want a durable material and long-lasting construction.
• Offer high absorbency: From mopping up spills to drying cleaned surfaces, these and other demands require a highly absorbent towel. You don't want your staff to spend too long on one spill, using a handful of towels to take care of the mess. Towels with a dense pile, or lots of loops, provide more surface area to soak up liquids than other options. You can then improve your towels' absorbency even more by caring for them correctly.
• Provide a lint-free dry: When you're drying tables, counters and dishes, you don't want to leave bits of your towel behind. Selecting a trusted linen manufacturer and a durable towel in the first place will help, but you can also take steps to properly maintain your dishcloths.
• Come with color variety: Shop high-quality cloths that come in an array of colors. Those details can suit your home kitchen's decor, or, as a restaurant owner, you could use them to color-code your towels. Keep one color for waitstaff to use on customer tables and other colors for food prep areas. You can then separate colors based on food prep needs, like having one shade for meat preparation. While you'll clean and disinfect your towels regularly, keeping linens separate can help you maintain cleanliness.
• Easy to launder: Try to choose towels that you can machine wash and dry for your convenience. As a restaurant owner, especially, you'll want linens you can launder and reuse regularly without worrying about hand-washing or air-drying.
• Available with wholesale pricing: Whether you shop for a home or professional kitchen, you want the best-quality towels for the best price. Shopping with Towel Super Center gets you wholesale pricing, whether you're buying for residential or business needs. You'll save money on your dish towels in the long run with lower prices and durable, quality linens.

Types of the Best Kitchen Towels

Now that you know what to look for, it's time to purchase the highest-quality linens for your home or business. You have a few kitchen towel options to select from. Consider these three general categories to choose the best dish towels.

1. Restaurant Kitchen Towels

Restaurant towels offer the quality you need to keep everything running smoothly for your business. These dependable cloths are absorbent and durable, suitable for anyone on your staff. Cooks can use these as side towels to clean small messes in the kitchen or protect themselves and surfaces from hot pots and pans. All those diverse tasks mean you need to equip your staff with multipurpose linens.

Your servers can also use restaurant kitchen towels to take care of spills at the front of the house to create a safer environment. That gives your restaurant the clean and professional look you want, thanks in part to these towels' convenience and reliability.

You'll find various types of restaurant towels to choose from. These categories include linens like grill towels, made to withstand high heat and grease from your restaurant's grill. You could also need glass towels for your restaurant to keep anything from drinking glasses and stemware to windows and decorative glass features clean.

2. Bar Towels

Bar towels or bar mops feature little loops of dense fibers, creating a cloth that's more absorbent than regular dish towels. These cotton options usually come in white and may include a colored stripe, letting you color-code your towels for professional or home use. The result is a uniform look, which is particularly useful for commercial restaurants.

You want your cleaning crew and waitstaff to carry clean and cohesive linens to keep your dining area spotless, and bar mops help you achieve that. Everyone from bussers and servers to bartenders and chefs can use these sturdy cloths.

Bar mops are often smaller than regular kitchen towels, making them convenient to clean small spills or for bussers to carry around and wipe tables. They're long-lasting options that provide the efficiency and absorbency you need for all your applications. Bar mops usually go through a lot more extreme use than kitchen towels, coming in handy for high-heat tasks and continuous messes.

Large and small restaurants alike appreciate bar mops for their durability and versatility. No matter your business' size, you might buy bar mops in bulk to always have a clean set available. Even as a homeowner, you'll find uses for these small, mighty cloths.

3. Home Kitchen Towels

Home kitchen towels are versatile linens, and they don't have to stand up to the extreme daily use that restaurant towels do. But you'll still want quality options that can withstand regular use and washes. For homes, you may choose various types of linens for different purposes in addition to dish towels.

• Fingertip towels: These linens fall between the size of washcloths and hand towels. Many homeowners use fingertip towels as a decorative element because they come in countless colors. But you can also dry hard-to-reach areas and clean up small spills with fingertip towels.
• Hand towels: If you often wash and dry your hands in the kitchen, you might consider having a set of hand towels specifically for this room. Select complementing colors for the room's decor and have enough to swap out a clean towel as you wash used ones.

As a homeowner shopping for the best dish towels, you want something that matches your kitchen decor. Complementing your linens to your kitchen's design is especially pleasing if you drape a towel over your stove's or dishwasher's handle to have on display. If you don't have an opinion about your towels' appearance, choose restaurant-quality options and bar mops for wholesale prices and durability. Even if you opt not to put your dish towels on display, these commercial varieties with their pure-white colors match any decor.

What Is the Best Material for Kitchen Towels?

While the look and size of your dish towels are essential, their material is equally crucial in creating efficient, absorbent and easy-to-work-with towels. When you know what to look for in a long-lasting towel, you can also consider how to care for them to maintain your kitchen towels and keep them sanitary. Get to know these common kitchen towel materials.

Cotton

If you're considering 100% cotton towels for your kitchen, you're in luck. You'll find cotton towels available across a range of linen sizes and types. Many linen manufacturers choose cotton because it's an affordable and natural material. Cotton offers a comfortable feel for your dishcloths, perfect for drying your hands after continuously washing them throughout the day.

Cotton towels are also suitable for bulk and daily use, since they're easier to care for than other materials. You can machine wash and dry 100% cotton towels, but be sure to follow the care instructions. Cotton can shrink with careless laundering, but selecting high-quality linens and knowing how to maintain them will help preserve your dishcloths.

Note that cotton towels become heavy when wet, so stick with smaller sizes and use other cloths to help mop up excessive spills. When you're shopping for dishcloths for your home, 100% cotton options are an excellent choice, though restaurant owners can also enjoy how easy these towels are to wash.

Cotton and Polyester Blends

When you shop for dishcloths from Towel Super Center, you'll find linens in a 86% cotton and 14% polyester blend. That combination of materials creates an absorbent and long-lasting towel. While cotton-poly blends won't be as plush as a 100% cotton towel, they still offer a pleasant softness if you dry your hands with dish towels. Even then, having a cloud-like plushness from your dishcloths isn't usually a priority.

Instead, cotton-poly towels are still high-quality, professional options. You don't want your bussers or waitstaff walking around the dining area with tattered towels. Send them out with fresh white linens that are intact after countless washes and uses when you choose an 86/14 blend. The cotton-polyester combination, in partnership with quality towel construction and proper care, creates cloths that can withstand wash after wash.

Microfiber

Microfiber cloths are increasing in popularity. Common in applications like auto detailing and professional housekeeping, microfiber cloths are quality, absorbent linens. The individual fibers are often polyester or nylon, thinner than human hair and silk. Instead of looping through the cloth, these tiny fibers remain split. The result is a larger surface area of absorbent fibers, making a highly effective cloth for drying dishes and cleaning spills.

Choosing microfiber cloths for your kitchen gets you soft and lightweight linens. You can quickly dry a surface, wring out the cloth and reuse it, as long as it's sanitary to do so. And microfiber cloths come in convenient sizes, like 16" x 16" and 16" x 24". They're also lint-free, giving you a spotless clean for anything from plates to tables.

Note that microfiber dish towels come with specific care instructions. Check the tag on any linens you purchase to care for them correctly, because microfiber cloths often include the following directions on how to wash them.

• Keep similar materials together: If you combine microfiber and cotton towels in the washer, you'll risk transferring lint from the cotton cloths to the microfiber ones. Wash and dry microfiber cloths only with the same materials, which will be less maintenance for a business going through bulk supplies every day.
• On lower temperatures: If you machine wash and dry your microfiber towels, use the lowest heat settings possible. Hot water or air risks melting this cloth's small fibers, ruining the feel and absorbency.
• Without fabric softeners or dryer sheets: You should launder linens without fabric softeners or dryer sheets regardless of the material. But microfiber cloths are particularly sensitive to these laundry additions, which build up on the fibers and limit your cloth's absorbency and effectiveness.

Buy the Best Kitchen Towels for Your Home or Business From Towel Super Center

When you need the best dish towels for your home or business, shop with Towel Super Center. At Towel Super Center, we create our kitchen towels to withstand the demands of commercial and residential kitchens alike. And with wholesale pricing, you get linens that don't take up too much of your budget. 

Shop our selection of quality, wholesale towels today, whether you need anything from durable bar mops to versatile restaurant towels.