Perfect Bacon Bowl

There's something about late-night television commercials ... particularly the ones for the As Seen on TV products.

They look so ... enticing. I even want the cat-thing ... even though I don't have a cat.

So, there's the Perfect Bacon Bowl. Late at night it sounds like a good idea. In broad daylight, I wonder why I need bowls made of bacon, anyway. But I think again. Why don't I need bowls made from bacon?

The bacon bowl maker is made from some sort of alien plastic stuff. Okay, not alien. That I know of.

But it's not metal, which is good because I wanted to make bacon bowls in my microwave. If I wanted to make a dozen bacon bowls, the oven would make sense. One or two, I'm not going to be heating up the oven.

All ready for filling.

Inexplicably, the instruction say you should grease the bowl. Bacon is greasy, obviously, but I greased the bowls anyway, then placed the bacon according to the instructions, and popped them into the microwave for 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

And ... voila! Bacon bowls. Well, sometimes it was done in 2 minutes 30 seconds. But depending on the bacon, it could be a little longer. So you just need to check the doneness of the bacon (and maybe get rid of the grease!) and cook for a little longer, 30 seconds at a time.

When I went to remove the bacon from the bowls after the bacon was cool, there was just a little it of sticking until the bacon just sort of popped off the bowl. So, yeah, I'd suggest following the instructions. A little bit of oil makes sense.

When I first heard about these, I thought, gee, why not use use an upturned muffin pan to make bowls in the oven? But the joy of these things is that you don't have to use the oven. You can, if you want to. But like I said, the microwave makes more sense for just one or two bowls.

And then you do this. Scrambled eggs in a bacon bowl.

And ... the moat around the bowls did a pretty good job of containing the bacon grease. There was a little splattering in the microwave, as you'd expect any time you cook bacon in there. But it was no worse than any other microwave-bacon-cooking adventure.

If you want to, you can make the bowls ahead of time and refrigerate. If you want them warm, just microwave for 30 seconds or so, to take the chill off. If you cook them longer, they tend to sag a bit, but it's not terrible.

These could be considered one-trick ponies if you only want to use them for bacon, but there's no reason you couldn't turn them upside-down and use them to bake or microwave other things. Or make cookie bowls or bread bowls. Or ... well, pretty much anything else you want to use them for.

I have a weakness for shaped bakeware, so I'll probably find a lot of uses for these. Even some that don't include bacon.

Who's it for: Bacon lovers.

Pros: BACON bowls. Works in the microwave.

Cons: Normally, I would say price, but these are getting a lot less expensive.

Wishes: Mini bacon bowls would be kind of neat for one-bite appetizers, although wrapping the bacon around small ones might not be so fun.

Source: I received these from the company's PR firm for the purpose of a review.