Review: The Everyday Set of Microwave Bowls From Anyday

My wife and I use our microwave the way most people use their microwaves, which is to say not as an appliance to cook things, but a sort of reheating machine or a place to zap popcorn. Occasionally, you might catch one of us cooking veggies in there—a surprisingly good use for the machine—or making a scrambled egg in a mug, but mostly we just use it to reheat.

So when celebrity chef David Chang came out as a backer of a new set of bowls specifically designed to cook food from scratch in the microwave, I was curious. The bowls are made by a company called Anyday, which was was founded by the food business professional Steph Chen. It's also one of the many cookware brands owned by Meyer Corporation, whose portfolio includes KitchenAid, Hestan, and Farberware. The bowls are marketed as tools to help you harness the undiscovered power of the gadget you already have in your kitchen, saving time in the process.

It's an intriguing idea. Anyday's bowls, which the company refers to as “dishes,” come in four different sizes. The bowls are good looking, with frosted glass sides and vented glass lids that have silicone seals and handsome (microwave-safe) metal rims. They're designed to go from the microwave to the dinner table to the fridge. Yet as I pulled them out of the shipping box, there was also a little voice in the back of my head that was hard to ignore.

Wait a minute, it said, Aren't these what most people just call “bowls?”

At $120 for a set of four, with similar and highly rated plastic-lidded sets from brands like OXO and Pyrex available for around a quarter of that amount, some testing was in order to answer that question. There is also the added wrinkle of Chang himself, who along with his famous restaurants, TV series, and recent memoir, has recently been associated with a pair of toxic workplace issues. Let your conscience guide your purchasing decision.

Compared to what exists for appliances like multicookers like the Instant Pot and slow-cooker books, there's very little in the way of breakaway microwave cookbooks. This means you'll likely end up cooking Anyday's own recipes, which are, in keeping with the company vibe, time-saving. The recipes are also fairly interesting. Who knew, for example, you could make a lovely savory egg custard in the microwave in the space of minutes? Or that you could get clever and start cooking a peanut sauce in a bowl, then toss some bok choy on top, zap it once more and have something fresh and tasty to serve with rice?

Photograph: Nader Khouri/Anyday

I started with the company’s recipe for kimchi, mushroom, and tofu stew, where you put every ingredient in the bowl—the headliners are joined by garlic, ginger, gochujang, salt, and stock—then hit start. I put mine in my trusty little GE microwave, Sparky Jr., a tiny yet capable 700-watt workhorse, for 18 minutes. That length of time feels like an eternity when you're used to nuking things for a minute or two. Yet there was a surprising amount of reward for relatively low effort. I love kimchi stew and this one felt like what you might end up getting at an office cafeteria in Seoul—nothing sophisticated but still quick and quite satisfying.

It's probably a good idea to offer a micro refresher here. Microwave ovens generate microwaves that create heat by exciting the polar molecules, notably water, in the food. Things like fans and turntables in microwave ovens help the waves come in contact with as much of the food as possible, resulting in more even cooking.

I asked Chris Young, one of the authors of Modernist Cuisine and founder of smart-thermometer company Combustion Inc., about why people would opt to use a microwave to cook something in the first place.

"Microwaves are best at cooking foods that are relatively thin and that don’t mind a bit of unevenness in the cooking temperature," he says. "Many plant foods are ideal in this regard, and speedy heating often preserves natural aromas and sweetness in ways no other cooking technique can."

Since I had his attention, I also asked why some metal products spark (or “arc”) in the microwave, something I was a little wary of, considering the big metal ring on the edge of each Anyday lid.

"Arcing occurs if you have two metal points close enough where the RF energy can create enough of a voltage difference to create a spark, just like a spark plug. So, the tines of a fork are bad, but a spoon is fine because there is no gap a spark can jump across. Crinkled foil can create a spark gap, a smooth metal bowl won’t."

Lacking a gap, the metal rims on the Anyday lids don't spark. Though if your microwave is cavernous enough, the company specifies not to put two bowls in the microwave at the same time to avoid arcing between lids.

After the kimchi stew, I made Anyday's poached salmon recipe where you wilt chard leaves in coconut milk with ginger and lemongrass, then nestle the filets on top and let it cook for a few more minutes. While I wish you could print the recipes on the website (technically you can, but practically you won't; they aren’t displayed in a printer-friendly format), I did appreciate the way you can plug in your microwave wattage and the number of courses you're making and then see customized time settings and advice about which size bowl to use. Once again, I cooked a pleasing, not-too-complicated dish that came together in a short amount of time, perfect for a weeknight. That little voice popped up again though.

Not to get all debunk-y, it said, but couldn't you poach the salmon or make the kimchi tofu stew in a pot on the stove in about the same amount of time? Couldn't you also keep a better eye on it—especially delicate, easy-to-overcook protein like seafood—on the stovetop?

The company’s shrimp scampi with its garlic, butter, lemon juice, and red pepper flake combo came out very well, but also demonstrated this dilemma. The shrimp itself was just the tiniest bit tough, something I found much easier to police a few nights later, when I cooked the Shrimp Louie from the New York Times' Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter. With the latter, I could hover over, watch, and poke the shrimp, pulling them from the hot, salty water in the lidless pot a few moments before they were done, something you can't do when food is sealed inside a bowl in the microwave, essentially robbing you of your cooking senses. Still, the Anyday scampi recipe was great and we had it over lemony noodles, reveling in our garlicky dinner.

Photograph: Nader Khouri/Anyday

But couldn't you do these microwave recipes in a regular bowl? To find out, I made the Anyday chicken and rice dish, where a bed of rice is submerged in water and a bit of marinara, along with some garlic, red pepper, and peas. Pieces of chicken sit above it all, their tops just barely poking out of the cooking liquid. I made one batch in an Anyday bowl, as directed, and as soon as it came out of the oven, I made another in a near-identically shaped Pyrex bowl with a dinner plate as a lid. Each batch cooked up in less than 25 minutes, the rice pleasingly soft, tomatoey and nostalgic, the chicken tender, the effort minimal, the difference between the two bowls negligible.

And there's the rub.

For cooking in the microwave, as well as for serving meals at the table and holding food in the fridge, they're very nice bowls. However, they're also just bowls. You probably already have something like them, minus that classy glass lid, in your kitchen.

The more I used Anyday's bowls and its recipes, the more I wished the company’s main product wasn’t fancy glass bowls but a cookbook to help you rediscover the kitchen tool you already own, perhaps in the style of Hugh Acheson's excellent book, The Chef and The Slow Cooker. Plus, I'm not sure how ready I'd feel to improvise and start adapting recipes to work in the microwave. While the Anyday website sports more than 50 recipes, along with twenty-odd “ingredient guides,” I'd rather have a substantial cookbook.

As for the Anyday bowls themselves, should you get them? It's tricky math. If you've got 120 big ones burning a hole in your pocket and you like how they look, be my guest. At, say, $60, with those good looks and nice glass lids, I'd recommend them without reservation. But you could also use those much-less-expensive OXO and Pyrex sets, or the bowls you already own.