The Best Kitchen Towels

Lesley Stockton is a staff writer at Wirecutter all things kitchen, dining, and food-related. Prior to joining Wirecutter, she spent her whole professional life cooking in restaurants, working in test kitchens, and catering, so she knows her way around a dish rag. She’s also covered other food-adjacent textiles for Wirecutter, including table linens and aprons.

Wirecutter contributor Haley Sprankle also conducted testing for this guide.

To find the best kitchen towels:

• We’ve spent almost 100 hours researching hundreds of options, and tested 25 since 2014.
• We read hundreds of user reviews and scoured the Internet for reputable editorial guides from sources like Cook’s Illustrated.
• We read Wirecutter’s own guide to bath towels, which has a wealth of information on terry cloth.
• We went to kitchen and home stores to feel towels, see the available colors, and talk with salespeople.
• We talked to Wirecutter editorial director Christine Cyr Clisset, who has years of experience covering home textiles, and Tux Loerzel, store manager at Whisk, a kitchenwares store in Brooklyn, New York.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, we review and test products with complete editorial independence. We’re never made aware of any business implications of our editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

When it comes to quickly drying dishes, hands, and produce, or even handling hot pans and casseroles, nothing is as versatile as a thick cotton towel. Cotton is durable, affordable, and absorbent. But not all cotton towels are the same, and their performance varies with thickness, size, and the type of weave. Listed below are the criteria we believe are most important when selecting a kitchen towel:

Holds up through many wash cycles: Because kitchen towels are exposed to bacteria from your hands, cutting board, and food, they need regular laundering (ideally, multiple times a week, depending on use). A strong weave and durable stitching will help keep your kitchen linens looking like new through those many wash cycles, and high-quality long-staple cotton will hold up better than cheap cotton.

Absorbent and multi-purpose: The effectiveness of a great kitchen towel comes down to a delicate balance of its thickness and size. For example, our top pick is thick and large enough (around 20 by 30 inches) to dry a full draining rack of dishes, and provide protection from hot pots and casseroles when triple-folded.

In comparison, flour sack towels are a lot thinner, but can run up to 33 by 38 inches, and that extra area makes up for their lack of absorbency per square inch. And inexpensive terry cloth bar mops are smaller, measuring around 16 by 19 inches, but good ones made of plush, thirsty cotton terry cloth are still efficient at wiping up spills.

Cute enough to hang in your kitchen: Textiles are a big part of people’s kitchen decor, so we kept aesthetics in mind with our recommendations. Plain, plush fabric sewn with clean hems is attractive by virtue of its construction, but we also looked for towels available in multiple textures and colors. We gave preference to sets available in white because it’s the most neutral color.

To evaluate the quality, absorbency, and durability of our kitchen towels, we ran the following tests:

First, we washed and dried each towel 10 times. This served two purposes: to test the towel’s durability through multiple launderings and to remove the industrial coating (called sizing) that protects the fabric during shipping and storage (but also inhibits absorption). After the wash test, we eliminated kitchen towels with loose threads and frayed hems.

To test absorbency, we laid each towel over ½ cup of spilled black tea or water for 30 seconds, then checked for any unabsorbed liquid. As we predicted, the thinner towels absorbed less per square inch than thicker ones.

We also dried water glasses to check for lint. But after 10 wash and dry cycles, most of the kitchen towels were virtually lint free.

Top pick

Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels

The best kitchen towel

With terry cloth on one side and waffle weave on the other, this towel combines absorbency, utility, and attractiveness.

Buying Options

$23 from Williams Sonoma
(set of four)

Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels offer the best combination of absorbency, durability, attractiveness, and price of all the towels we tested. They're available in loads of colors and the four-pack price averages out to under $6 per towel.

They're absorbent and low-lint. This dense cotton kitchen towel combines two different textures on opposite sides: terry cloth and waffle weave. Though the terry weave is flatter and less plush than that of other terry towels, it absorbs moisture as well as any fluffier cloth we tested.

It dries dishes and glassware without depositing lint, and is thirsty enough to tackle a draining rack full of dishes after dinner. The smoother waffle side also excels at delicate tasks, like de-fuzzing strawberries and blotting water from tender produce.

They're durable. We’ve used and abused the Williams Sonoma towels in our test kitchen since 2016, and they’ve only recently started to show wear in the form of a small hole or snag here and there. For the most part, the seams and stitching are still completely intact. And to say we’re hard on our kitchen towels is an understatement. We deploy them for every spill, from coffee and tea, to red wine and red meat drippings.

We’ve also continued to add more of these towels to our supply. In late 2020, we even retested them, after seeing some reviews on Williams Sonoma’s website suggesting that they’d changed in quality. But after washing and drying the new set five times, we compared them to our older towels and found no difference in performance. It’s helpful to remember that washing can change the look and feel of a towel quite a bit: It will shrink and thicken after one wash, and soften after several, becoming more absorbent as the protective sizing washes off.

They're attractive. The terry cloth loops are small and tightly packed—unlike bathroom hand towels—and waffle weave has a smooth and hygienic look that’s befitting for the kitchen.

Each towel also has a sewn-in corner loop so you can conveniently hang your towel from a hook or drawer pull. If white isn’t your style, the All-Purpose Pantry towel is available in numerous other colors.

The only flaw with the Williams Sonoma towel is that if you order it online, the shipping charge bumps up the price per towel. But if you live near a Williams Sonoma store, you could simply purchase the towels there. Or if you can wait, these towels regularly go on sale, sometimes with free shipping.

Budget pick

Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops

Cheap and absorbent

These affordable terry cloth towels aren’t cute, but they’ll get the job done, wiping up spills from big to small.

Buying Options

$24 from Amazon

If you’re looking for an affordable kitchen towel built to handle your day-to-day spills, the Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops are your best option. These terry cloth towels are durable, absorbent, and easily washable. They aren’t the kind of towel you’d want to hang on display, but since they cost around $1.50 apiece, you can keep a stack of them stashed in a drawer for extra-messy tasks, and you won’t have to worry too much about stains.

They are excellent at wiping up messy spills. They soaked up ½ cup of water consistently in our tests, and cleaned up a sticky smoothie effectively.

They’re a great value. These inexpensive towels are surprisingly durable considering their price. After running them through the washer (in hot water) and dryer multiple times, we spotted a couple of frayed threads, but the seams held up remarkably well.

They're linty. Although these towels are great for cleaning up spills and drying your hands, they are not meant to polish your glassware. In our tests, they still deposited lint on glasses after multiple runs through the wash.

They also aren’t the most attractive towels. Some may even argue that they resemble cheap bathroom hand towels. But they do come in several colors besides white, which isn’t the case with many other bar mops.

Like most bar mops, they’re small. After laundering, they measure about 15 by 17 inches, whereas standard kitchen towels are about 20 by 30 inches. But if you’re looking to get the job done and aren’t worried about hanging these on display, these are the towels to get.

Best for

Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels

Best for food prep and glassware

Available only in white, these flour sack towels are large and thin, and dry faster than terry cloth.

Buying Options

$29 from Amazon
(set of seven)

Although Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels can’t mop up a spill as quickly as our other picks, their usefulness for food preparation sets them apart. They’re oversized (we recommend the 33- by 38-inch size), lint-free, and finely woven. Their absorbency and smoothness make these towels ideal for delicate jobs like wicking excess moisture from tender herbs, lettuces, and berries.

The quality is remarkable. Aunt Martha’s are the thickest and highest-quality flour sack towels we’ve ever tested. We’ve looked at a few flour sack towels over the years, but they were all thinner and less absorbent than Aunt Martha’s. That said, Aunt Martha's aren’t as absorbent as our other picks.

They excel at many tasks. Because they’re lint-free, these cloths are great for drying glassware. Flour sack cotton is thin, so it’s a good alternative to cheesecloth for straining liquids. You can also use these to gently dry tender berries, or wick excess moisture from cut watery vegetables like eggplant. And they're great for serving warm dinner rolls at the table.

They're the largest of all our picks. Even though they’re thinner than the Williams Sonoma towels, the biggest Aunt Martha’s towels are 50 percent larger (measuring 33 by 38 inches to their 20 by 30 inches). So what the Aunt Martha’s towels lack in absorbency per square inch, they make up for in more surface area, and the thinner cotton allows the towel itself to dry faster.

White is the only option. If you’re into colorful or decorative kitchen towels, these are not for you (although they make a good blank canvas for painting or stamping if you want to decorate them yourself).

We plan to test a handful of new towels soon, including the Williams Sonoma Super Absorbent Towels and Super Absorbent Waffle Weave Towels, which could rival our top pick. Both are textured, while also coming in different patterns and colors that some people might prefer over the solid-colored Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels.

This is not a comprehensive list of everything we tested in previous iterations of this guide, just what’s still available.

We used to recommend the Now Designs Ribbed Towel. Our original towels are still holding up well, with no traces of loose threads or fraying, but the new towels we bought in 2017 are far less durable. Some of the stitches loosened after 10 wash cycles. These findings mirrored some Amazon comments about the towels’ decline in quality.

We can’t say for sure that the Sur la Table Ribbed Kitchen Towels are a rebrand of the Now Designs towels, but they bear an uncanny resemblance. Unlike the Now Designs, the Sur la Table towels held up through multiple washings. But if they are the same towel, we could see durability issues arise down the road.

Like our top pick, the Crate and Barrel Waffle-Terry Dish Towel has a terry-cloth side and a waffle-weave side. But the fabric is almost too thick and absorbent. The tea stain didn’t lift completely, even after a soak in hot water and oxygenated bleach.

Towels by Doctor Joe Surgical Huck Towels are lintless and absorbent, but also small and thin. We think flour sack towels are a better choice because of their large size.

The Utopia Kitchen Flour Sack Towels are smaller and much thinner than our flour sack towel pick. The loose weave makes these so thin, you can almost see through them.