Let’s be honest, we all have our messy moments, especially in the kitchen. keeping a hefty stack around ensures you’re always ready to mop up spills, wipe down counters, and dry your hands, dishes, and produce. The best kitchen towels are durable, absorbent, and versatile—perfect for drying dishes, wiping spills, or prepping food while keeping your kitchen stylish.
Since 2014, we’ve wiped up gallons of spills and dried countless dishes with 25 different Best Kitchen Towels, and the Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels have emerged as our top pick. The Best Kitchen Towels are absorbent, long-lasting, budget-friendly, and come in a variety of colors.
Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels
The Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels are our top choice because they’re large, highly absorbent, durable, and affordable. Featuring tightly looped cotton on one side and a waffle weave on the other, these towels offer the absorbency of terry cloth without the bulk.
They’ve been a regular staple in the test kitchen and in several staff homes since 2016, showing minimal signs of wear. The towels come with a handy loop for hanging and are available in a broad range of colors.
Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops
The Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops are a budget-friendly option that gets the job done. In our tests, they absorbed spills effortlessly, cleaned up messes effectively, and withstood multiple washes without showing much wear.
Though they aren’t the most stylish (more akin to bathroom hand towels than traditional kitchen towels), this is typical of bar mops. On the plus side, they do come in several colors beyond just white.
While they may not be ideal for polishing glasses, these towels are a solid pick for those wanting a cost-effective solution for kitchen cleanup.
Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels
Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels are the thickest and most absorbent we’ve encountered in this towel style. However, like most flour sack towels, they are at least 50% larger than our other picks and made from thinner cotton. These towels are an excellent option if you’re after a smooth, lint-free cloth that’s perfect not only for drying dishes, hands, and delicate produce, but also for food prep tasks like straining stocks.
Why You Should Trust Us
Lesley Stockton is a Wirecutter staff writer covering kitchen-related topics, dining, and everything food. After years in restaurant kitchens, working in test kitchens, and catering, she knows a thing or two about textiles in the kitchen. Lesley has also written for Wirecutter about other textiles sharing space with food, like table linens and aprons.
Wirecutter contributor Haley Sprankle helped test for this guide.
What we did to find the best kitchen towels:
- We have spent almost 100 hours researching the hundreds of options to test 25 since 2014.
- We read hundreds of consumer reviews and examined the reliable editorial guides of trusted sources like Cook’s Illustrated.
- For terry cloth, we consulted Wirecutter’s guide to bath towels, which gave us a solid foundation.
- We went to kitchen and home stores to touch and feel the towels, see what colors were available, and talk to salespeople.
- We consulted Wirecutter’s Editorial Director, Christine Cyr Clisset, who has years of experience covering home textiles, and Tux Loerzel, the store manager at Whisk, a kitchenware store in Brooklyn, New York.
- As with any Wirecutter review, our editorial process is fully independent. Our recommendations are never influenced by any sort of business considerations. For more information about our editorial standards, read here.
Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels
Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels offer the best balance of absorbency, durability, style, and affordability of all the towels we tested. Available in a variety of colors, a four-pack costs under $6 per towel, making it a budget-friendly option for any kitchen.
These towels are both absorbent and low-lint. They feature two distinct textures on opposite sides: terry cloth and waffle weave. While the terry weave is flatter and less plush than traditional terry towels, it still excels in absorbing moisture as effectively as any fluffier option we tested.
The towels dry dishes and glassware efficiently without leaving behind lint, and their absorbency is more than enough to handle a full draining rack of dishes after a meal. The smoother waffle side also makes them ideal for more delicate tasks, like de-fuzzing strawberries or blotting excess water from tender produce.
Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops
If you’re looking for an affordable kitchen towel that can tackle daily spills, the Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops are a great choice. These terry cloth towels are durable, highly absorbent, and easy to wash. While they might not be the most aesthetically pleasing towels to hang on display, their practicality more than makes up for it. At around $1.50 each, they’re an excellent value, and you can stock up without worrying about stains. Keep a stack tucked away for those extra-messy tasks, and they’ll do the job without issue.
Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels
Although Aunt Martha’s Premium Flour Sack Dish Towels may not be as fast at soaking up spills as some of our other picks, their versatility in food prep makes them stand out. These towels are oversized (we recommend the 33- by 38-inch size), finely woven, and completely lint-free. Their absorbency and smoothness make them ideal for delicate tasks like removing excess moisture from tender herbs, lettuces, and berries.
The quality of Aunt Martha’s towels is top-notch. They’re the thickest and most durable flour sack towels we’ve tested, surpassing other brands we’ve looked at over the years, which were often thinner and less absorbent. That said, they’re still not as absorbent as some of our other choices.
Aunt Martha’s towels excel at various tasks. Their lint-free nature makes them perfect for drying glassware, and the thinness of the flour sack cotton makes them a great alternative to cheesecloth for straining liquids. They can also gently dry delicate berries or wick moisture from watery vegetables like eggplant. Plus, they’re excellent for serving warm dinner rolls at the table.
The Competition
This is not a comprehensive list of everything we’ve tested in previous versions of this guide, but rather a selection of what’s still available.
We used to recommend the Now Designs Ribbed Towel. While our original towels are still in good condition with no signs of loose threads or fraying, the newer towels we bought in 2017 are much less durable. After 10 wash cycles, some stitches had loosened. This trend matched comments on Amazon regarding a decline in quality.
Although we can’t confirm whether the Sur la Table Ribbed Kitchen Towels are a rebranding of the Now Designs towels, they share a striking resemblance. Unlike the Now Designs, the Sur la Table towels held up well through multiple washes, but if they are indeed the same product, we anticipate potential durability issues down the road.
The Crate and Barrel Waffle-Terry Dish Towel, like our top pick, features a terry-cloth side and a waffle-weave side. However, the fabric may be a bit too thick and absorbent for certain tasks. After a tea stain soak in hot water and oxygenated bleach, it didn’t lift completely, which was disappointing.
Doctor Joe Surgical Huck Towels are lint-free and absorbent but small and thin. We found that flour sack towels are a better option for their larger size and versatility.
Finally, the Utopia Kitchen Flour Sack Towels are much smaller and thinner than our recommended flour sack towels. The loose weave of these towels makes them almost see-through, which impacts their functionality.