The Bacon Bowl: The Intersection of Peak Bacon Craze and Peak Unitasker — A Perfect Storm of Uselessness That Makes a Bowl Out of Bacon
A mold for creating bowls made entirely of bacon — because someone looked at a bowl and thought 'this needs to be meat' and nobody in the room said 'no'
The Bacon Bowl is a plastic mold that shapes raw bacon strips into a bowl form, which you then bake in the oven until the bacon crisps into a freestanding, edible container made entirely of pork.
Let me repeat that with the emphasis it deserves: it is a bowl. Made of bacon. That you eat.
The Bacon Bowl arrived during America's peak bacon craze — approximately 2009-2015 — the era that produced bacon toothpaste, bacon soap, bacon-scented candles, bacon-flavored vodka, bacon-themed weddings, and the general cultural conviction that putting bacon on, in, or around literally anything constituted an improvement. The bacon craze was a mass delusion during which an entire nation agreed that a pork product was a personality, and the Bacon Bowl was its architectural achievement: not just putting bacon ON food, but making the bacon INTO the food delivery system itself.
The product doesn't work well. Bacon shrinks when cooked — unevenly, unpredictably, and with the structural integrity of a material that is actively rendering its own fat. The bacon bowl that enters the oven as a pristine pork vessel emerges as a warped, shrunken, grease-soaked crater that may or may not hold its shape long enough to be filled, photographed, and eaten. Many bacon bowls collapse upon filling. Many bacon bowls collapse upon looking at them firmly. Many bacon bowls collapse.
The grease is the second problem. A bowl made of bacon produces a bowl-shaped quantity of bacon grease, which pools inside the bowl during cooking and must be drained before filling. You are pouring grease out of a meat bowl so that you can fill the meat bowl with food that will sit in the residual grease of the meat bowl. The food inside the bacon bowl tastes like bacon. The salad inside the bacon bowl tastes like bacon. The mac and cheese inside the bacon bowl tastes like bacon. Everything inside the bacon bowl tastes like bacon because everything is sitting in a greased bacon vessel. The Bacon Bowl is not a container. It is a flavor prison. Everything that enters it becomes bacon-adjacent whether it wanted to or not.
The Vision: What If Bowl, but Meat?
The Bacon Bowl was invented by someone who attended a party where bacon-wrapped appetizers were served and thought: "What if the ENTIRE serving vessel was bacon?" This is the same logic that produces chocolate-covered everything, deep-fried everything, and every other culinary escalation where a good ingredient is applied to contexts where it doesn't belong.
Bacon is excellent. Bacon as a food item — crispy, salty, savory, eaten on a plate or in a sandwich — is one of humanity's great achievements. Bacon as a structural material is not an achievement. Bacon is not load-bearing. Bacon does not have the tensile strength of a bowl. Bacon is fat and protein arranged in strips, and strips of fat and protein do not want to be bowls. They want to be strips. The Bacon Bowl forces bacon into a shape it resists, and the resistance manifests as: warping, shrinking, collapsing, and the production of enough grease to lubricate a bicycle chain.
The irony: you can make a bacon bowl without the Bacon Bowl. Drape bacon strips over an inverted muffin tin. Bake. Same result. Free technique. No unitasker required. The Bacon Bowl is a $10 plastic mold that replicates what a muffin tin does for $0. The product is a solution to a problem that was already solved by equipment you already own, applied to a food that didn't want to be a bowl.
The Glorious User Experience
Todd from Dallas, TX — ★☆☆☆☆
"My bacon bowl collapsed while I was filling it with scrambled eggs. The eggs entered the bowl. The bowl walls caved inward. The eggs and the bacon merged into an undifferentiated pile of breakfast that no longer had a container and no longer had a shape. I had made a bacon bowl that lasted approximately four seconds in service before structural failure. The bacon bowl had a shorter career than most Vine videos. One star."
Amanda from Portland, OR — ★☆☆☆☆
“Bacon shrinks when cooked — unevenly, unpredictably, and with the structural integrity of a material that is actively rendering its own fat”
Click to Tweet"The grease. Nobody talks enough about the grease. You bake the bacon bowl. You remove it from the oven. The inside of the bowl is a swimming pool of liquid fat. You drain it. You think you've drained it. You fill the bowl with salad. The salad sits in residual grease. The salad that was supposed to be healthy is now sitting in a bacon fat bath. The health value of the salad has been assassinated by the vessel. One star."
Every Person Who Received This as a Gift — ★☆☆☆☆
"I received the Bacon Bowl. I used it once. The once was enough. The bacon bowl was photographed, eaten, and the mold was placed in the drawer of kitchen unitaskers — the drawer that also contains the avocado slicer, the banana slicer, the corn butterer, and every other single-purpose kitchen tool that was used once and stored forever. The Bacon Bowl has joined its people. One star."
Rachel from Austin, TX — ★★☆☆☆
"Two stars because, look, a bacon bowl filled with mac and cheese IS fun. It IS a moment. For approximately ninety seconds — the ninety seconds between 'it came out of the oven intact' and 'it collapsed into a greasy pile' — the bacon bowl is peak entertainment. Those ninety seconds are real. Those ninety seconds are joy. Everything before and after those ninety seconds is grease, disappointment, and a mold in the drawer. Two stars for the ninety seconds."
The Verdict: The Last Article
The Bacon Bowl is a plastic mold that turns bacon into a bowl that collapses, leaks grease, and can be replicated for free with a muffin tin. It is the final product in our 150-article database, and it is a fitting conclusion: a product that takes something great (bacon), applies it to a context where it doesn't belong (structural engineering), produces a result that is impressive for ninety seconds and disappointing for every second after, and can be achieved without purchasing the product at all.
The Bacon Bowl IS No Want This. The concept is seductive. The execution is flawed. The alternative is obvious. And the review is: you didn't need this. You never needed this. But for ninety seconds, you understood why someone made it.
That's every product on this website. That's the whole project. One hundred and fifty products that promised something, delivered something else, and taught us that the best alternative is usually the simplest one — the one that was there all along, in the drawer, on the shelf, already in your kitchen.
The bacon was always great as strips. The bowl was always great as a bowl. They didn't need to meet. But they did, and we wrote about it, and now you know.
Welcome to No Want This. We reviewed the worst so you can buy the best.
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We rate it 1 out of 5 structural meats.
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✅What to Buy Instead
Weaving Bacon on a Muffin Tin
Free technique: drape bacon strips over an inverted muffin tin. Bake. Same bacon bowl. No $10 mold. The free version of the paid product.
Lodge Cast Iron Skillet
Cook bacon properly in cast iron. Eat it as strips. The way bacon was designed to be consumed. Revolutionary acceptance of bacon's natural form.
A Regular Bowl
Put bacon IN a bowl instead of making a bowl FROM bacon. The bacon is still there. The bowl still works. Both items performing their designed functions. Problem solved.
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