Thermoses have gotten kind of amazing these days. Have you noticed? The best double-walled, vacuum-insulated travel mugs can keep your coffee hot literally all day. I’ve left my Fellow Carter Move mug (see on Amazon) in a car for hours while hitting the farmers market and meeting a friend for lunch, only to discover my coffee still bracingly hot and tasting pretty much the same as when I brewed it. It feels like a miracle.
So when a new company called Host Modern offered to do the same thing for candied yams or brussels sprouts, with a handsome new double-wall, vacuum-insulated serving dish, I was primed to fall in love—inasmuch as one can fall in love with a serving dish.
If the dish works well at keeping food hot for extended periods, potlucks and picnics are the most obvious application. But even just serving hotter food at home is, in its own little way, life-changing.
I have cooked multiple seven-dish feasts for my family this past month, while testing Thanksgiving delivery meal kits, and timing is always the toughest part of a multi-part meal. It feels sad to nuke your brussels sprouts before dinner because the turkey ran long and the greens got cold. It only takes 20 minutes of reprieve to save Christmas!
Interestingly, Host Modern’s public relations touts their serving dish as a “Yeti for food.” But of course, Yeti—a stalwart in the hot-things-hot, cool-things-cool game—likewise makes a Rambler vacuum-insulated bowl that is also, self-evidently, a Yeti for food. Which professed Yeti for food is the most Yeti for food? Yeti or Host Modern? I filled the bowls for a face-off.
First off, it’s worth asking if anyone needs a thermal serving dish. Is Thanksgiving saved, bettered, its pleasures embiggened? Or is it all just cold comfort? I assessed each brand’s ability to keep liquid and solid food hot longer, versus a basic lidded Pyrex 4-Quart Mixing Bowl ($32) that costs a fraction of either the Yeti or the Host Modern.
I also used each bowl at a family feast, as a road test—and logged comments made by family members. Likeability also matters in something you hope to keep in your life. Call this the mom-and-sister test.
I’ll spare you some suspense here. Serving dishes with big mouths don’t and can’t work as well as a travel mug at keeping things hot or cold. Most of the heat loss in a vacuum-insulated thermos is out of the lid. The lid on a big serving dish is, well, big. You can feel the heat leaking. But both the Yeti and the Host Modern still performed better than non-insulated serving dishes at keeping your food warmer, longer. Here are the results.
Specs: Host Modern vs Yeti Rambler Bowl
The largest Yeti Rambler bowl and Host Modern serving dishes are, in some regar,d radically different beasts—but have about the same advertised serving capacity.
The Host Modern is a large casserole-style serving dish, with a large surface area and the ability to fit a 9 x 13 aluminum baking dish inside it. Host also sells its own $40 baking dish that is back-ordered at the time of this article, but which I had the chance to test.
The idea is that you can bake your food, then drop the baking dish inside the serving dish for longer storage at food-safe or dining-friendly temperatures. Even better, you can drop boiling water into the main serving dish, then drop a casserole dish into the water as a heat bath to keep better temperature stability. Much like the Ford Model T, you can have it any color you like (so long as it’s white).
The Yeti Rambler bowls are, as advertised, bowls. They won’t fit a casserole dish inside, but for this the three-bowl set of 4.5-quart, 2-quart, and 1-quart bowls can nest conveniently inside each other. The set has mostly been advertised as campware, as befits Yeti’s outdoor-friendly image, though Yeti’s reps say that use as a home serving dish has turned into one of the biggest selling points for the Rambler bowls. This is also what I would use them for. Honestly, they look nice. Yeti stuff looks nice.
Heat Test #1: The Boiling Water Test
OK, so you’re probably not planning to keep soup in a casserole dish. But the most objective test of heat retention is boiling water. Water has a stable heat capacity, and a precise boiling temperature. The same amount of water, from the same faucet, at the same elevation, will contain about the same amount of heat energy.
And so I heated a liter of water (technically 0.9 liters of water, the capacity of my Fellow Stagg EKG kettle), and poured it into each of the Host Modern, the 4.5-quart Yeti Rambler, and the 4-quart Pyrex. I left the lid on each, then checked on each at 20 minutes and an hour. For the Host Modern, I used a hot water bath underneath the casserole dish for best possible results. For the other two, I preheated by filling with hot water.
The amount of immediate heat loss to the air, and to the dish, stayed surprisingly consistent among serving dishes: the water leveled out quickly to 165 degrees Fahrenheit in each case, as measured by an infrared thermometer.
On holding times, the two insulated-wall serving dishes both outperformed the Pyrex, but not by as much as you’d hope. The Yeti came out ever so slightly on top, dropping more slowly over the course of an hour. But both the Yeti and Host Modern still dropped 40 degrees Fahrenheit after an hour. The uninsulated Pyrex, meanwhile, dropped a whopping 60 degrees.
Alas, at least in our test, heat loss to the container (even when pre-treated with hot water) meant that none of these maintained food-safe temps above 140 degrees for very long. Use an actual thermos if you’re transporting bone broth long distances and then expect to drink it.
Note also that Host Modern conducted its own study, filling the serving dish 80-percent full with boiling water under presumably ideal conditions. According to the company, the Host Modern dish kept boiling water above 140 degrees for 2 hours when filled with a larger quantity of water.
Heat Test #2: Candied Yams
Alongside the pumpkin, the sweet potato stands as America’s most stalwart holiday side. And so it became my litmus test for the thermal dishes’ ability to retain heat on food. I tested the Host and the Yeti side by side and found that at least with a 14-ounce serving of candied yams, the temp dropped pretty precipitously.
Larger servings might retain heat better—because the food itself has more thermal mass. But what I found was that the serving dishes offered were about a 20 to 30 minute holding time at eating temperatures, unless your food starts very, very hot. Not bad—and better than uninsulated dishes. But I wouldn’t cart this to a potluck and expect your food to hold up. The heat loss from the lid is just too great.
But do note that when using a water bath around a baking dish, the Host actually outperformed the Yeti this time. Neither did overly well after an hour, with a candied yam dish whose temperature started at a serving temperature between 150 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit. In both cases, the dishes maintained at safe serving temperatures above 140 degrees for 20 minutes. Both dropped a lot more over the next 40 minutes, to temperatures below appropriate serving temperatures (and well below food-safe if left out longer than an hour.)
Again, these results don’t quite gibe with Host Modern’s own testing, which involved stuffed peppers heated to 198 degrees Fahrenheit. These, according to Host, stayed food-safe at 152 degrees after 90 minutes. My food dropped temp much faster than this—though again, higher volumes of food will hold temperature longer.
Likeability Test
This is an admittedly anecdotal sampling. But: With both the Host Modern serving dish and the large Yeti insulated bowl laid out on the kitchen island, both my sister and mother—who arrived at different times—immediately and without prompting beaded in on the Yeti with a mix of praise and envy. Both had nearly the same words: “Oh, that’s a cool dish!”
Yes, serving dishes are apparently “cool” in my family. Rebellious youth is behind us.
In Host Modern’s defense, Yeti is a known brand—and the dish was blue, therefore perhaps more striking. The Yeti’s thermal-insulated qualities are perhaps a bit better advertised by its stainless-steel top. But in the immediate impression test, the Yeti did win.
This said, once I dropped the baking casserole dish inside the Host, all eyes were on Host as a useful dish. So Yeti gets the edge, here, on impressing houseguests from one family in particular—but the Host is a bit of a sleeper once its charms are made apparent.
Final Impressions
I like both of these serving dishes. I like the Host Modern as a casserole serving dish. I like the Yeti as a serving bowl. I like that I can put hot things inside them, and that the outside stays insulated. I like that they keep food warm for an extra 20 minutes or so.
Yeti probably has the edge, for the simple fact that I can get a 3-bowl Yeti set ($150) for the price of the Host Modern with a baking dish (when it comes back in stock). But also because I can feel, literally, on the outside of the bowl, that the Yeti has better double-walled insulation. The Rambler stays beautifully cool to the touch. If I can cover the lid with more material, I’d trust it more for longer-term holding.
But I will admit my hopes are a bit dashed on both counts. I had hoped for a thermal-insulated dish I’d feel comfortable taking to a potluck—containing a big roast, or a platter of mac and cheese—with the expectation the dish would stay above the safe holding temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit for extended periods. This isn’t reliably true for either.
Physics are physics: Serving dishes with large-surface-area lids cannot hold temp the same way as an insulated cylinder with a small lid. Yeti, admirably, is very straightforward about this in its website copy, noting (with questionable grammar) that “bowls with wide opening means content may cool quicker than Rambler drinkware.” And if the FDA is to be believed, you don’t really want to eat food that’s been kept between 90 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit for longer than an hour.
But though my hopes for potluck utility weren’t borne out, each of these insulated dishes is still terrific for large multi-course meals. An extra 20 or 30 minutes at appropriate serving temperatures can be the difference between a well-timed meal, and one where the mac and cheese had to go into the microwave—especially on meals where the oven is in heavy use and can’t be used as a warming drawer.
Presumably, for some families, wrangling the brood together to actually sit at the table on a Thursday can also be a 20-minute process. And so each of these dishes still serve a useful function. The Host Modern is especially well-suited for big feasts, given that the casserole dish can just slip into the insulated sheath, then land handsomely on the table without need of a hot pad.
Which is to say the Host Modern thermal serving dish is best for when I am, in fact, the host. For this, it’s quite nice.
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