Innovative Mixing Bowls

From Season 11: Sweet Endings

Amid all the newfangled equipment in the test kitchen, our mixing bowls remain paragons of simplicity. Made of stainless steel or heat-resistant glass, they’re indispensable for everything from mixing cookie dough to making pancake batter to melting chocolate over a jury-rigged double boiler. Yet these workhorses have their shortcomings: They tend to wobble as you mix, the rim can make pouring a mess, and metal bowls can’t go in the microwave. To see if modern design could do better, we tested nine new mixing bowls in glass, plastic, metal, and silicone in sizes ranging from 2 to 5 quarts.

The cutting-edge bowls offered features such as silicone or rubber-lined bottoms to prevent skidding, and handles and pouring spouts to make pouring easier. All withstood the beatings of a hand mixer, whisk, spatula, and wooden spoon when we tested them by mixing cookie dough and pancake batter. However, when non-skid material covered the entire bottom of a bowl, this created too much insulation if we wanted to use the bowls over hot water as a double boiler (our favorite method of melting chocolate); just a touch of nonskid worked much better. We didn’t like many of the plastic bowls; they scratched easily, retained food odors, and some weren’t microwave-safe. One flexible silicone bowl was microwave-safe, but it wobbled on the counter and was too flimsy for the hand mixer.

In the end just one innovative mixing bowl offered an improvement on our usual workhorses. Our winner updates a classic: It’s wide and heavy with a thin, non-skid silicone ring around the outside base to anchor it during mixing. A teardrop shape, a spout, and a handle make pouring easy and neat, and it’s microwave-safe.