Oven Rack Hand-Burners

This set of oven-rack protectors almost makes sense at first, but if you think about it for a moment, you realize that if you stick something made of silicone in the oven, it gets hot like the rest of the oven. So you reach in the oven after baking your silicone things for twenty minutes, touch them, and are shocked to find out that they’re hot. (The reviews mention this frequently.) The reason silicone works as an insulator for oven mitts is because it doesn’t degrade when exposed to high temperatures, and is a thermal insulator, meaning that it picks up heat more slowly than a thermal conductor, such as metal, or your hand.

Anyway, even if these silicone protectors did work, which is to say that they somehow stayed cool after baking in the oven and allowed you to safely touch the oven rack, the next step of action would be to reach in there and grab that hot pizza with your bare hands.

(Silicone isn’t a particularly good insulator, it’s just a cheap, inert one. Fiberglass, used in home insulation, is about 8 times more thermally insulating than silicone rubber. And Aerogel, a synthetic material made of silica, is three times better at insulating than fiberglass, if you’re interested in heat transfer or materials, which most people aren’t.)