Put a lid on it. That’s really the whole answer, but the lid you use matters.
Soup, beans and pasta sauce all spit because pockets of liquid get hotter than the rest and burst through the surface. Stirring halfway helps a bit. Covering the bowl stops the mess reaching the walls and the ceiling of the microwave, which are the bits nobody wants to clean.
Most of us reach for cling film, which sags onto the food and goes straight in the bin, or a side plate, which comes out too hot to touch. Kitchen roll is the other favourite, and it goes soggy and still lets sauce out round the edges.
The Tovolo collapsible cover is a dome of food-grade silicone with a rigid top that has vents all over it. The vents let steam escape, so the food heats evenly instead of turning to mush, while the dome catches the splatter. There’s a grab handle moulded into the top, so you can lift it off without a tea towel. It’s BPA free as well, which I’d want from anything sitting over hot food. It won’t save you from a bowl filled right to the brim, mind. That can still boil over at the base, because the cover only stops what flies upwards.
The collapsible part is what makes it worth buying over a hard plastic dome. It pops up to about 3 inches tall to fit over a deep bowl, and pushes down to about three quarters of an inch for storage. A rigid cover is the kind of thing that ends up living on top of the microwave because it won’t fit anywhere else. This one slides into a drawer with your baking trays.
The medium size is 10.5 inches across and fits over plates and bowls up to about 10 inches wide, which is most dinner plates. If you tend to reheat on big pasta bowls or serving platters, measure first, because Tovolo does a larger version too.
Because the top is full of holes, you can also turn it over and use it as a small colander for rinsing berries or draining a tin of chickpeas. It’s dishwasher safe, which is exactly where something that’s been sitting over bolognese should end up.
Tovolo Collapsible Microwave Splatter Cover, medium (Amazon)
