Glad 1.2, 1.9 qt, spout and lip

Because pouring a bowl of batter is a two-handed job, and Glad is the only listing on this shelf to design for both hands. The spout gives the liquid somewhere to leave; the lip on the opposite end gives your other hand somewhere to hold and tip from. Without it you are gripping a smooth curved wall with wet fingers while trying to aim. Three of the thirteen sets here have a pour spout at all — this, KitchenAid ("each bowl features a pour spout") and OXO ("wide grip and spout") — and all three are plastic, for a mechanical reason: a spout is molded, and you cannot easily press one into a steel bowl or form it in tempered glass. The six stainless sets and the two Pyrex sets have none.

It depends whether a mixing bowl is also a storage box in your kitchen. Six of the thirteen sets here come with lids — Ziruma (glass), Priority Chef, Viking, Zulay, COOK WITH COLOR (TPR), Boskermeal and Pyrex Colors — which turns each bowl into a container for the fridge. Glad offers none, and gives you freezer safety without one. The thing worth knowing before you choose is that lids are the part that fails: Priority Chef tells you to "wash lids by hand" because plastic lids warp in a dishwasher and then stop sealing, and Ziruma builds its whole listing on that, supplying glass lids that "keep their shape and seal". If you want lids, want glass ones.

For two of the three bowls, and the third is unmeasured — which is the real gap on this page. Glad publishes 1.2 qt and 1.9 qt and then only "large bowl" with no figure. For context on this shelf, a proper mixing bowl for a cake batter wants 4 to 5 quarts: Cuisinart and OXO both top out at 5 qt, KitchenAid and Ziruma at 4.5, and COOK WITH COLOR at 5.8 qt — the largest here. At the other end, Pyrex Essentials stops at 2.5 qt, which is fine for prep and tight for a double batch. Without a figure for the large bowl you cannot tell which camp this set is in. The 1.9 qt medium is a good prep size.