Yeti Vs Host Modern: Which Insulated Serving Dishes Are the Best?

got thermoses Something amazing is happening these days. did you see? The best double-walled, vacuum-insulated travel mugs can keep your coffee hot all day. When I was going to the farmers market and meeting a friend for lunch, I left my Fellow Carter Move mug (view on Amazon) in the car for hours, only to find that my coffee was still very hot and tasted almost exactly the same as when I made it. It feels like a miracle.

So when a new company called Host Modern offered to do the same thing with a beautiful new double-wall, vacuum-insulated serving dish for candied yams or Brussels sprouts, I fell in love – as much as one can fall in love with a serving dish.

If the dish does a good job of keeping food warm for a long time, potlucks and picnics are the most obvious applications. But even just serving hot food at home, in itself, is life-changing.

While testing Thanksgiving delivery meal kits, I’ve made several seven-dish feasts for my family over the past month, and timing is always the hardest part of a multi-portion meal. It feels sad to pluck your Brussels sprouts before dinner because the turkey is long gone and the greens have gone cold. All it takes is 20 minutes of respite to save Christmas!

Interestingly, Host Modern’s public relations promote the dishes they serve as “food for the Yeti”. But of course, Yeti — a veteran in the hot-things-hot, cool-things-cool game — similarly makes a Rambler vacuum-insulated bowl that is, self-evidently, a Yeti for food. Which claimed yeti is the most foraging yeti for food? Yeti or Host Modern? I filled the bowls for the face-to-face.

First, it’s worth asking whether one needs a thermal serving dish. Has Thanksgiving been saved, made better, its joys expanded? Or is it all just cold comfort? I assessed each brand’s ability to keep liquid and solid food warm for longer periods of time, while a basic lidded Pyrex 4-quart mixing bowl ($32) costs a fraction of a Yeti or Host Modern.

I also used each bowl as a road test at a family feast — and logged comments made by family members. Probability also matters in what you want to maintain in your life. Call it the mother-and-sister test.

I will tell you some secrets here. Serving dishes with a large mouth cannot and does not do as good a job as a travel mug for keeping things hot or cold. Most of the heat loss in a vacuum-insulated thermos occurs outside the lid. A large serving dish has a very large lid. You can feel the heat leaking. But both Yeti and Host Modern still performed better than non-insulated serving dishes at keeping your food warm for longer. Here are the results.

Specifications: Host Modern vs. Yeti Rambler Bowl

The largest Yeti Rambler bowl and the Host Modern Serving Dish are, in some ways, radically different beasts – but their advertised serving capacity is nearly identical.

Courtesy of Host Modern