The Key to a Cleaner Kitchen Is a Splatter Screen

The Key to a Cleaner Kitchen? A Splatter Screen

Lisa McManus Executive Editor, ATK Reviews

Splatter screens can be divisive pieces of gear. Some of us see these gadgets as just one more item to wash up after cooking. Others claim they are helpful because they vastly reduce the mess on your stovetop and counters. And for those who have small kids bopping around the kitchen, keeping hot oil droplets corralled takes on the greatest importance.

To test splatter screens, we broke out the most aggressively sizzling, sputtering foods we could think of: frying bacon, simmering tomato sauce, and searing skin-on chicken thighs. The best-performing splatter screens subdued the flying splatters, keeping our kitchen cleaner. They stayed in place on the pan and were easy to use. Others were flimsy and ineffective, more effort to use than they saved us.

When frying bacon during testing, we lined the area around our skillets with kraft paper and compared how much grease landed on the light-brown surface. The tall walls of the Frywall kept splatter to a minimum, compared to an uncovered skillet.

Most were shaped like tennis rackets, with a screen-filled loop and a straight handle. One was an innovative model in the form of a silicone collar, creatively named the Frywall. It instantly created high walls that stopped splatters in their tracks, without limiting our view of and access to the food.

For the skeptics among us, our minds have been changed about the value of a good splatter screen in our kitchens.

Read our full review of splatter screens.

Behind the Testing We looked at each metal splatter screen under a microscope and found a visible difference in the thickness of the strands of metal that form the mesh. It may sound obvious, but we found that screens with thin wires just didn’t successfully block as much grease as screens made with heavier gauges.