The Best Kitchen Towels We’ve Ever Tested

Best Functional

Functional, absorbent, and easy-to-use kitchen towels can take the place of much of your paper towel usage in the kitchen. But this reusable solution can run into a few snags: odor, stains, and cost.

Poor-quality kitchen towels used again and again can develop all kinds of unsavory smells and stains, making them a lot less enjoyable to use.

You also need a decent amount—at least 10—to get you until the next laundry load, so functional kitchen towels can’t be too expensive per towel, either. Out of all the towels we tested, these are the four that reigned supreme in terms of functionality.

We found the Homaxy Waffle Weave Kitchen Dish Cloths a pleasure to use thanks to their soft and thick texture, as they were great at wiping up hands or wiping down counters.

The Hyer Kitchen Microfiber Kitchen Towels dealt with the common conundrum of ineffectively dried dishes by being two-sided—a plush side for drying and a firmer side for rougher use.

Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops are a customer favorite (we’ve used them in our own kitchens for the last four years!), and they performed well in our testing, too, thanks to their absorbency and low price.

Samuel Lamont Poli-Dri Kitchen Tea Towels are accented with a pop of red, and they handled most cleaning tasks easily. Plus, they come in eight different colors to mix it up in your kitchen.

Homaxy Kitchen Dish Cloths

$12
$10 at Amazon

Samuel Lamont Tea Towel

$14 at Walmart

Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops Towels

$24
$20 at Amazon

Hyer Microfiber Dish Towels

$14 at Amazon

Best Display

Display kitchen towels (aka tea towels) add a bit of character to the kitchen, showing off color and personality while they hang on the oven handle or near the sink.

“I like to use these for laying out as an extra dish-drying mat, drying hands, and sometimes dishes," Schuering says. Sometimes, she even uses them as oven mitts or makeshift trivets, too.

But with their fun patterns and color often comes a serious loss in display kitchen towels’ absorbency and ease of use.

So, it’s best to use some of our favorite tea towels for light drying or wiping (or as napkins when eating), rather than as any kind of cleaning powerhouse.

Aunt Martha’s Vintage Dish Towels brings a mid-century touch to your kitchen linens at a low price—each dish towel is under $3. Williams Sonoma Classic Stripe Towels proved to be especially durable and colorfast, and they got softer after each use.

King Arthur Flour Sack Towels have a classically farmhouse look, and they were great at drying dishes and hands. Last but not least, Pottery Barn French Striped Grain Sack Tea Towels were soft and snag-free, and they dried easily, too.

Aunt Martha’s Vintage Dish Towels

$11
$9 at Amazon

Williams Sonoma Classic Stripe Towels

$23 at Williams-Sonoma

King Arthur Flour Sack Towels

View on Kingarthurbaking.com

Pottery Barn French Striped Grain Sack Tea Towels