What You Need To Look For When Buying A Bowl Scraper

There seems to be a never-ending supply of must-have kitchen gadgets out there. While there are plenty of reports on the latest, greatest — and usually most expensive — kitchen available, there are also a lot of goodies that won't break the bank but can significantly improve your cooking experience. A great example of this is the small, but mighty bowl scraper.

An easy way to think of these tools is as spatulas without handles. They allow you to get your hand into the bowl to scrape down the sides, and also manipulate sticky doughs with more leverage than you can get from a spatula. Most importantly, they'll probably be one of the most affordable tools in your kitchen.

Professional baker Clarice Lam told Epicurious that the best of these little guys are the D-shaped ones with durable silicone centers and more flexible edges. This allows you to scrape down any bowl shape and gives you the control that will make your bowl scraper feel like an extension of your hand. These are the important qualities that make the bowl scraper any baker's best friend.

It might seem useless to replace a spatula with a bowl scraper, but there are some jobs in that the latter is more well-suited. Bien Cuit's Zachary Golper told The New York Times that the bowl scraper is the baker's equivalent to a good set of chef's knives. Bakers can be possessive of the small, inexpensive tools because over time the plastic starts to bend into an ideal curve. It starts to feel less like a common kitchen tool, and more like something uniquely suited to each baker's hands.

Because they're in your hand, instead of at the end of a handle, they also provide more leverage when handling difficult doughs. The bowl scraper is great for anything that you would normally want to use your hand for, but don't because it's messy, unsanitary, or ineffective. The flat side of the blade is great for evening out frosting. It can double as a bench scraper and move chopped ingredients from the cutting board to the pan, or scraps to the trash. It can also make handling sticky, wet, or just tricky doughs a non-stick breeze. 

Some of the best recipes out there are also some of the most difficult. They won't stand a chance once you're equipped with a trusty bowl scraper though.

There are of course simple and obvious uses. If you use a stand mixer for your baking then you should be scraping down the sides of the bowl as you mix. You can also ensure that you get every drop of your brownie or cake batter out of the bowl as well.

The bowl scraper will also help handle more challenging doughs. America's Test Kitchen used a sopping wet fougasse dough and stodgy speculoos dough to help find its best bowl scrapers. Rye doughs are also notoriously hard to work with. Even low-percentage rye doughs often end up too sticky to handle, and using a non-stick bowl scraper is the best way to keep your hands clean as you work the dough.

Any high-hydration dough can also benefit from this same trick. Some bakers avoid high hydration (doughs that are nearly equal parts flour to water) because they are sticky and difficult to handle. They're also increasingly more popular because they allow for a beautifully open interior structure though, and present an interesting challenge. With a bowl scraper in hand, you can charge forward knowing that you're ready to handle this style of dough with minimal fear.