Hell Hands Let Me Play With Fire
I’ve always regarded grilling gloves the way I think of an apron proclaiming my excellence as a cook. Most barbecue gloves are an accessory that’s nice to have — handy when you’re flipping burgers or tending coals, but not an essential I rush to grab when headed out to my deck to make a meal. Hell Hands changed all that.
Hell Hands are overbuilt grill gloves made by Big Green Egg, and they have more in common with the PPE firefighters wear when spraying out blazes than most mitts you’ll find on the shelf at your local hardware store. They’re engineered to handle temperatures of up to 900 degrees, meaning you can literally poke your finger into a domed Neapolitan pizza oven to turn a pie or stir up the coals in the bottom of your pit without using a poker. The Hell Hands cover your arms up to your elbow and use strategically placed patches of proprietary heat-deadening material to offer extreme protection while also leaving enough dexterity to do most things you’d need to do while prepping a meal on a grill.
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I don’t think of my Hell Hands as competing with any other grill gloves. Even an Ove Glove paired with a silicone gripper is not going to protect your hands from heat like these do. Instead, they’re my substitute for the tongs, grill, grate lifters, and other metal tools I used to need while smoking pork ribs or searing steaks. Before I put my steaks on over charcoal, I like to reach into my grill and give them a stir.
The Hell Hands are especially helpful when you’re dealing with ceramic components in a Kamado cooker, including the diverter that holds the grill grate, which also protects the meat from the flames in the firebox below. Until the Hell Hands, there really was no good way of handling ceramic components, which are fragile but absorb enough heat to stay hot for three hours after a high-temperature cook.
The Hell Hands are also extremely helpful when you’re scraping a grill clean of all the black gunk that accumulates on the bars in little bubbles of hard-baked fat and juices. If you’ve got a metal scraping tool or an all-metal brush, you can heat the grill up to a few hundred degrees to loosen the crusty mess and then use the gloves to keep your hands safe while you scrape.
The top of the Hell Hands is a soft and surprisingly supple calfskin that runs up to the elbow. This is mostly useful to protect you from ambient heat and sparks. The magic is in the fingers that are reinforced with patches of silvery, heat-resistant Armortex material. While you do have what I would consider to be full mobility, you’re not going to be effectively communicating in American Sign Language while wearing these gloves, and your fingers do feel like little sausages. But the extra-thick padding is applied in a way that you have articulation for what you actually want to do, which is grab hot things and move them around without worrying. These gloves do that in a way nothing else before them has.
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