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Oct 31, 2024

The Best Mixing Bowls | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Lesley Stockton Lesley Stockton is a writer focused on kitchen and entertaining. Her coverage includes grilling, kitchen knives, and cookware, just to name a few. A good mixing bowl might not be

By Lesley Stockton

Lesley Stockton is a writer focused on kitchen and entertaining. Her coverage includes grilling, kitchen knives, and cookware, just to name a few.

A good mixing bowl might not be someone’s first thought for a kitchen essential over say, a quality chef’s knife or a solid cast iron skillet. But the first time a handheld mixer flings batter out of a too-shallow bowl across every inch of the kitchen, it becomes pretty clear just how essential they are.

Aside from their uses in baking, mixing bowls are great for keeping yourself organized while cooking, storing leftovers, and pretty glass bowls can work for serving in a pinch. If you’re feeling particularly goblin-like, they serve as pretty good late-night cereal vessels too.

After scooping 200 cookies, cracking over 60 eggs, and tossing many boxes of cereal in 13 mixing bowl sets, we think the Cuisinart CTG-00-SMB Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls with Lids are the best for most whisking, folding, and mixing needs. If you want a durable glass set, the Pyrex Smart Essentials 8-Piece Mixing Bowl Set is great for simple baking projects and serving.

These deep metal bowls are ideal for containing rogue drips from spinning beaters and everyday mixing jobs.

If you need all-purpose mixing bowls that are also microwave-safe, this durable tempered-glass set has all the functional sizes you need.

Cheap and durable, these lightweight mixing bowls are sold individually so you can assemble your perfect set.

Looking for something to make in your mixing bowls? Try these recipes for spaghetti carbonara, lemon garlic kale salad, green papaya salad, and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies from NYT Cooking.

These deep metal bowls are ideal for containing rogue drips from spinning beaters and everyday mixing jobs.

The Cuisinart Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls with Lids are sturdy, well-made, and the best option of all our picks if you use a hand mixer. That’s because they’re deep set and effectively keep splashes in the bowl (not all over your counters). They also have snug-fitting lids for storing leftovers or taking food to potlucks.

In our tests, we found the Cuisinart’s brushed stainless exteriors and rolled-edge lips provided ample traction and grip to hold and maneuver the bowls with one hand. But the Cuisinart bowls are sold as a set and are pretty small (1½, 3, and 5 quarts). If you frequently cook in large batches and need more capacity, consider our also-great pick, the Thunder Group mixing bowls.

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If you need all-purpose mixing bowls that are also microwave-safe, this durable tempered-glass set has all the functional sizes you need.

If you want glass mixing bowls, the Pyrex Smart Essentials 8-Piece Mixing Bowl Set offers the most functional sizes at the best price. Even though glass isn’t as durable as stainless steel, this Pyrex set is a good choice if you want pieces that are microwave-safe and attractive enough for serving.

The included snap-on plastic lids also make these bowls convenient for transporting dishes and storing leftovers. The set includes four bowls sized at 1, 1½, 2½, and 4 quarts plus their corresponding lids.

Cheap and durable, these lightweight mixing bowls are sold individually so you can assemble your perfect set.

If you want to build your own set or need bowls that can hold more than 5 quarts, Thunder Group’s Standard Weight Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls are a reliable choice. This style of basic mixing bowl is indispensable in restaurant kitchens because it’s wide and shallow, which makes it perfect for mixing, folding, whisking, and tossing. But the shorter walls don’t contain splatters from a hand mixer as well as our top pick, the Cuisinart bowls. These open stock bowls come in nine sizes (¾ quart to 20 quarts) so you can choose the exact capacities that suit your needs. They’re also exceptionally inexpensive but are only easily available through Webstaurant, which charges a hefty shipping fee, making the total cost for a set of Thunder Group bowls about the same as our top pick.

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As a staff writer for Wirecutter, I’ve authored guides to everything from skillets to stand mixers, and before that I toiled in restaurant, pastry, catering, and test kitchens for many years. As a young garde manger (cold appetizers and salad station) cook, I learned that maintaining my mixing bowls was as important as keeping my knives razor sharp.

For this guide, we focused on bowls made from stainless steel and tempered glass. Both materials are heatproof and perfectly safe to place over a pot of simmering water to create a double boiler.

They’re also nonreactive, meaning acidic foods like tomatoes, vinegar, and lemon juice won’t end up with a metallic taste. Stainless steel and tempered glass each have pros and cons.

Functionally, stainless steel offers more advantages than tempered glass.

Stainless steel is better if you:

Tempered glass is better if you:

Functionally, stainless steel offers more advantages than tempered glass. Glass bowls are much heavier and come in smaller size options than stainless steel ones. The largest bowl we found in a glass set measured 4 quarts (larger sizes, like this 6-quart tempered-glass bowl, are available open stock) but weighed almost double the 8-quart size from our top-pick stainless steel set.

If you use a hand mixer, stainless steel bowls are the best option. Glass bowls are weakened on a microscopic level with every drop, tap, and spoon scrape. Imagine how much damage whirring beaters on a hand mixer can cause.

Tempered glass is heat-treated to be more durable and resistant to sudden temperature changes than regular soda-lime glass. If you drop a tempered-glass bowl, it won’t necessarily break (we’ve dropped our favorite drinking glasses onto a marble floor many times in a row without them breaking), but it’s still glass and not totally shatterproof. And, as we learned while researching food storage containers and drinking glasses, minor surface damage can, on rare occasions, cause tempered glass to spontaneously shatter down the road.

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In deciding which mixing bowls to test, we immediately dismissed those made from plastic, silicone, or ceramic. Plastic bowls can’t function as a double boiler, while bendable silicone lacks sturdiness and can harbor off smells that may transfer to food. Ceramic bowls are pretty but also very heavy and prone to chipping along the rim.

We also excluded stainless steel bowls with rubber-coated bottoms because, judging from our experience, the seam between the nonskid coating and the bowl can harbor bacteria and mold. If you want to get the same effect, you can wrap a towel around the bottom of the bowl, use a wok ring, or take the advice that Jürgen David gave us: “Just stick it in a cake ring or a small pot to hold it in place.”

That said, we understand that even the best set-ups can’t stand up to an enthusiastic 5-year-old whipping eggs with one hand. If you have kids who like to help around the kitchen, a rubber bottom bowl might be the best option. We recommend the sturdy OXO Good Grips bowls in our guide to kids cooking tools.

A great all-purpose mixing bowl is nonreactive and lightweight yet sturdy. Beyond that, we had a short and simple list of criteria for mixing bowls we wanted to test:

Efficient mixing, folding, beating, and tossing: A great mixing bowl has sloped sides that allow you to cleanly toss nuts or chopped veggies without utensils, has deep walls that contain splatters, and has a wide shape for folding delicate batters. Wide, shallow mixing bowls are great for folding and tossing, but they often can’t contain splashes from a hand mixer. Although deep and narrow bowls help contain ingredients when you’re using a hand mixer or vigorously whisking vinaigrette or cream, they don’t allow for the wide range of motion needed to quickly fold whipped batters, and the extra mixing can deflate your end result.

Get a (good) grip: If you’ve ever struggled to get a secure one-handed grip on a mixing bowl while scraping the last bit of cake batter into a pan, you understand the importance of a wide rim. The rim on a mixing bowl gives your fingers something to hook onto so you can easily pick up the bowl or hold it in place even when one of your hands is busy mixing, whisking, folding, or scraping. We prefer rims that jut straight out to the side with a rolled or slightly bent edge to help anchor your fingertips.

A bowl’s surface texture is also important. Glass and mirror-finish stainless steel can get slippery when your hands are greasy or wet. In our tests, we found that brushed stainless steel bowls added traction for fingertips.

Size options: Though we saw bowls ranging in capacity from 1 ounce to 20 quarts, the most common sizes for home cooks are between 1 and 8 quarts. For stainless steel bowls, we think a set of three with capacities of 3, 5, and 8 quarts is perfect for most home cooks. A 3-quart bowl is appropriate for small jobs like whisking dressings, a 5-quart bowl is the right size for whipping up cakes and cookies with a hand mixer, and a big 8-quart bowl is ideal for making potato salad, coleslaw, and stuffing.

A great all-purpose mixing bowl is nonreactive and lightweight yet sturdy.

Tempered glass is a different story: Most glass bowl sets max out at 4 quarts. But that isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. A 4-quart bowl is plenty big for most home dinner prep and simple baking projects that don’t involve a hand mixer. Anything bigger can be too heavy to hold one handed (or at all). For example, we dismissed this open-stock 6-quart bowl because it was too bulky to be a convenient, everyday kitchen tool. Tempered-glass mixing bowls are a good option if you don’t do a lot of big-batch cooking or if you’re short on kitchen storage space and want a more attractive bowl that’s useful both in the kitchen and on your table.

Stability: A sturdy build and a flat base will keep your bowl in place while you mix. Glass and thicker-gauge stainless steel bowls are more stable because they’re heavier and wider bases are less likely to wobble or tip. Jürgen David of the International Culinary Center gave us a great tip to keep bowls stable: “Just stick it in a cake ring or a small pot to hold it in place.” A wok ring or a rolled-up dish towel tied into a circle works well, too.

We conducted the same tests across all the bowls. First, we whipped up airy genoise cake batter, which allowed us to perform several important evaluations for each bowl. The recipe for this classic French sponge requires cooking an egg and sugar mixture in a double boiler, so we noted how well each 4- to 5-quart bowl fit in a standard 2-quart saucepan.

Then we whipped the mixture at high speed with a hand mixer, judging how well each bowl contained splatters as we did so (ignoring our own advice, we even did this in the glass bowls).

Next we folded in sifted cake flour and melted butter, looking for which bowls allowed for a broad range of motion. Finally, as we scraped batter into cake pans, we gauged how comfortable and manageable it was to hold each bowl in one hand.

To see how easily and cleanly we could toss together ingredients without the use of utensils, we tossed two cups each of Rice Chex and Wheat Chex together in 4-, 5-, and 8-quart bowls until they were incorporated. Then we checked for pieces of cereal on the floor and countertop.

In our top-performing bowls, we did a second hand mixer test: whipping cream. Since genoise cake batter is pretty viscous to begin with, we wanted to see how our favorite mixing bowls contained splashes from thinner liquids.

The best way to mitigate splatters when using a hand mixer is to start slow and gradually build speed as your mixture thickens. But we wanted to see the worst-case scenario in terms of the bowl’s ability to contain ingredients, so we whipped the cream on high speed from beginning to end.

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These deep metal bowls are ideal for containing rogue drips from spinning beaters and everyday mixing jobs.

The Cuisinart Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl Set is durable, attractive, versatile, and the best choice of all our picks if you use a hand mixer when you bake. They do a better job at containing splatters from the whirring beaters than our also-great pick, the Thunder Group bowls. The Cuisinart bowls are also lightweight enough to easily hold with one hand and have tight-fitting lids for storing leftovers. But some folks might find the three-piece Cuisinart set limited in capacity with 1½-, 3-, and 5-quart sizes. If you frequently cook big batches—like pasta salad for 20 people—consider our also-great pick, the Thunder Group mixing bowls.

The Cuisinart bowls are durable enough to handle everyday use and abuse. We dropped them on the floor, tossed them in the sink, and subjected them to multiple cycles in the dishwasher on the “pots and pans” setting. Despite all that abuse, we never saw a single dent or rust spot.

In terms of aesthetics, the Cuisinart bowls are an objectively attractive set, much more so than the institutional-looking Thunder Group bowls. The Cuisinart bowls have a brushed finish that not only looks good but also provides texture that helps you get a good grip. That brushed metal, paired with the rolled-edge lip, helped us get a secure hold on the bowl with one hand while we scraped the last bit of cake batter into the pan.

The plastic lids included with the Cuisinart bowls snap snugly inside the lip. This feature makes the Cuisinart bowls good for transporting food for potlucks and storing leftovers in the fridge. We tested a similar-looking AmazonBasics set with lids that sat loosely in the bowl. They were leaky and would pop off if you knocked over or dropped the bowl.

The Cuisinart bowls are solid performers, but this set is limited size-wise since the largest bowl measures only 5 quarts—enough room to mix batter for a standard layer cake or a batch of Toll House cookies but not to season 5 pounds of ground beef for a burger-themed party.

The good news: you can always add larger bowls to your collection like the Thunder Group 8-quart and 13-quart sizes. The bad news: they won’t match. But if you get to the point where you need a 13-quart mixing bowl, you probably won’t care.

While the Cuisinart’s deeper, narrower shape is great for using an electric hand mixer, this design might prove to be a little tight for folding airy batters, like a souffle or genoise cake. Wider bowls allow for more range of motion, which lets you gently combine whipped eggs or cream with denser ingredients quicker, breaking as few air pockets as possible.

That said, we had no problems with the resulting genoise cake layer we mixed in the Cuisinart bowl. While it wasn’t the tallest in the group (⅛ inch shorter than the cake we made in a Thunder Group bowl), anyone would be satisfied with the result.

If you need all-purpose mixing bowls that are also microwave-safe, this durable tempered-glass set has all the functional sizes you need.

We like the Pyrex Smart Essentials 8-Piece Mixing Bowl Set because it includes the most practical sizes for mixing at the best price.

The thick half-inch rim on these bowls made them easier for us to manage with one hand than other glass bowls we tested. And even though we don’t put a lot of importance on the included plastic snap-on lids, they are convenient for potlucks and leftovers.

Next to the stainless steel variety, these Pyrex bowls are much heavier, but if you’re looking for microwave-safe mixing bowls, they’re the best choice for the money.

This eight-piece set includes four bowls of different sizes: 1, 1½, 2½, and 4 quarts (the other four pieces are the snap-on lids.)

In comparing this set with the others we tested, we found the Pyrex sizes most useful. The Duralex set maxed out at 3½ quarts, and the 10-piece Luminarc set included tiny pinch bowls that weren’t practical for mixing. For a straightforward mixing bowl set without clutter-making excess, Pyrex fits the bill.

In our tests, Pyrex’s 4-quart bowl outperformed Duralex’s paltry 3½-quart size (the largest in that set). The Pyrex bowl was roomy enough for us to whip up a lofty cake batter and quickly fold in flour, while the Duralex bowl’s smaller capacity required us to use more strokes to get the flour completely incorporated, and that extra work resulted in a deflated cake.

Of all the tempered-glass bowls we tested, the Pyrex bowls were the easiest to hold securely because of their thick rims. As on our stainless steel picks, the rims jut out perpendicular from the lip, extending about half an inch from the bowl.

The other two glass bowl sets we tested were awkward to grip because of a wide collar that extended down the side of the bowl but stuck out no more than a quarter inch.

A lot of folks will find the Pyrex set’s snap-on lids handy. They’re brightly colored with large, easy-to-read embossed numbers denoting the bowl they fit, and they make it easy to tote potluck dishes or to store leftovers. (We’re not huge fans of putting bowls in the refrigerator, however, because they’re space hogs. For something more practical, check out our guide to food storage containers.)

We’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you that glass bowls are heavy, much more so than stainless steel. The 4-quart bowl from this Pyrex set weighs almost 4½ pounds, over 3 pounds more than the 8-quart size from Thunder Group, our top metal-bowl pick. And we don’t think glass bowls are ideal to use with a hand mixer because the spinning beaters can scratch or damage the glass, making it more vulnerable to sudden breakage.

That said, if you want a mixing bowl set that’s microwave-safe and attractive enough to pull double duty as serving pieces, the Pyrex set is a solid choice.

The Pyrex Smart Essentials 8-Piece Mixing Bowl Set comes with a two-year limited warranty that covers manufacturing defects and breakages from oven heat, but excludes “incidental and consequential damages.” We’re pretty sure that’s legalese for accidents and misuse.

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Cheap and durable, these lightweight mixing bowls are sold individually so you can assemble your perfect set.

If the bowls in the Cuisinart set are too small for your needs and you want to assemble your own set, we recommend the Thunder Group Standard Weight Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls.

These commercial bowls are mainstays in restaurant kitchens because they’re cheap, durable, and available in nine sizes (up to 20 quarts). They’re wider and shallower than the Cuisinart set, which means they won’t contain splashes from vigorous whisking or hand-mixer beaters as effectively, but they’re still useful for any other mixing job.

If you can find these bowls at a restaurant-supply store, they are super cheap, costing only a few bucks apiece. Unfortunately, the cost of shipping mostly negates those savings when you buy these bowls online: buying a single bowl from Webstaurant, the most reliable online retailer we found, will cost about $15 to $20 with shipping, and the shipping fees go up when you buy multiple bowls.

With the added fee, a set of three or four bowls will cost around the same as our top pick, which we think is still a good deal. But we realize that many people will balk at paying twice as much for shipping as for the actual set of bowls, no matter what the total cost is. If it weren't for that, these are versatile enough that they would have been our top pick.

One of the best things about the Thunder Group bowls is that they’re available open stock. This gives you the freedom to build a set that’s perfect for your needs. Or, if you already have a collection of mixing bowls but need a bigger one for large batches, these are a great option because they’re inexpensive and lightweight.

The gently sloped sides and wide shape of Thunder Group’s design are ideal for techniques that require a wide range of motion, such as whisking and folding. The genoise cake we made in the 5-quart Thunder Group bowl was the loftiest we made in our tests. All that area was crucial for folding ingredients into our airy batter without it deflating.

We never lost our grip while mixing, tossing, and folding in the Thunder Group bowls. That’s because they're light and have a wide lip with a rolled edge that provides a secure anchor for our fingertips, even with less-than-dry hands.

Less heft helps you hold the bowl with one hand while you scrape the last bit of batter into a cake pan or scoop cookie dough. Lower weight is especially important for larger capacity bowls; 10 quarts of food is unwieldy on its own without the extra ounces a thick-gauged metal bowl will add.

The Thunder Group bowls are “standard weight,” but we found that term to be pretty meaningless from one brand to the next. Along with the Thunder Group pieces, we tested "standard-weight" versions of restaurant-style mixing bowls from Finedine, Vollrath, and Winco, and we found differences in the gauge of each brand. The Finedine and Winco bowls were thin and easily dented. The Vollrath and Thunder Group bowls were about identical in quality, but the latter cost less.

The Williams-Sonoma Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls are available open stock and in sets (of three and five pieces). They’re wide and come in useful sizes, but they’re also very expensive, and they don’t perform any better than the Thunder Group bowls.

Tovolo’s stainless steel mixing bowls are deep, available in practical sizes, and attractive. But the open-stock Tovolo bowls are almost twice the price of our top pick currently, and in our tests we noticed rust developing around the rim after we washed them.

This set of three stainless steel bowls from Tovolo costs less than the company’s open-stock mixing bowls, and we like the ring on the side for hanging them from a hook. But these bowls dent easily, and we expect rust will develop around the site where the ring is attached.

A pick from America's Test Kitchen, the Vollrath economy stainless steel mixing bowls, are good and durable restaurant-supply bowls. You can also find sets of either three or five Vollrath bowls available on Amazon, which isn’t the case for the Thunder Group bows. However, neither set had the ideal sizes. The five-piece set runs from medium to tiny, with the largest bowl being only 5 quarts. The three-piece set includes a 4-quart and a 5-quart bowl, two very similar sizes. We’d prefer a wider variety of bowls, including a couple bigger sizes, and for that you’ll need to turn to Webstaurant, where the Thunder Group bowls are a better deal for similar quality.

Winco’s standard-weight mixing bowls are thin and flimsy. We found that the bottom popped in and out with the slightest pressure from a spoon or whisk.

It’s surprising to us that the FineDine mixing bowl set is an Amazon best seller at this writing because these bowls were the thinnest, flimsiest ones we brought in to test. We disqualified this set out of the box because three of the six bowls arrived with dents.

The Luminarc 10-piece tempered-glass mixing bowl set has a lot of bloat, consisting of 10 bowls. Our glass pick, the Pyrex set, has four. The four largest sizes in the Luminarc set are practical for mixing, while the others are best used only as prep bowls. We also found the rim of the Luminarc bowls awkward to grip.

We suspected that, at 3½ quarts, the largest bowl of the 10 in this Duralex set would be too small, and we were right. The cake batter we made in this bowl deflated the most due to the extra work required to fold in the flour and butter.

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Jurgen David, associate director of pastry arts at the International Culinary Center in New York City, in-person interview, November 8, 2017

Sam Sifton, food editor at The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company), in-person interview, November 8, 2017

Lesley Stockton

Lesley Stockton is a senior staff writer reporting on all things cooking and entertaining for Wirecutter. Her expertise builds on a lifelong career in the culinary world—from a restaurant cook and caterer to a food editor at Martha Stewart. She is perfectly happy to leave all that behind to be a full-time kitchen-gear nerd.

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