The Best Bamboo Steamers

Originally from China, bamboo steamers are perhaps best known today as the vessels used to cook and serve many popular dim sum dishes. Because they’re made up of bamboo tiers with level interior surfaces, they’re ideal for steaming any food that needs to sit flat during cooking, such as dumplings or bao, or food that might break or become misshapen in a collapsible steamer with a curved base, such as fragile fish fillets. While you can get bamboo steamers in many sizes and configurations, they’re most commonly available as sets of two or three 10-inch round bamboo tiers—a size that is compatible for use with a 14-inch wok or a 12-inch skillet or sauté pan, among other vessels. Each tier provides about 68 square inches of surface area—roughly the same surface area as our favorite metal steamer. But because the tiers are stackable, you can double and triple the capacity as needed. Cooking dumplings for a crowd? Use two or three tiers. A piece of salmon for one? A single tier will do.

The separate tiers have another advantage: You can steam foods with different cooking times simultaneously, removing tiers as each food finishes cooking. Just be aware that foods take longer to cook the farther they are from the heat source. Another advantage is that the bamboo absorbs some of the steam during cooking, preventing condensation from dripping back onto your food and getting it wet. And of course, the steamers are pretty enough that you can serve food right out of them at the table.

A few caveats: Because they’re made of a natural fiber, bamboo steamers are more fragile than metal steamer baskets—they must be washed and dried carefully between uses so that they don’t warp, crack, or develop mold. They can absorb odors from your food or cooking liquid, though at least in our experience, these odors faded after a few washes and didn’t transfer to subsequent foods we cooked. Finally, bamboo steamers take up a bit more room in your cabinet; unlike those metal steamer baskets, they’re not collapsible.

• Tiers with Metal Bands: Models made entirely of bamboo are prone to warping, as their fibers absorb water during steaming or washing. If an all-bamboo steamer is solidly made, you can sometimes avoid this problem—one of the models we tested was fine after 10 washes. But two other all-bamboo models, less well-made, warped slightly over time, making it harder to fit one tier over another snugly so that steam wouldn’t escape. This slight warping didn’t significantly affect their performance—both still trapped plenty of steam and cooked food quickly. Still, they were a little annoying to put together, as we had to fuss a bit more to get the tiers to align. The tiers of a few models were reinforced with metal bands around their tops and/or bottoms. These metal bands helped prevent warping and kept the tiers aligned better over the course of 10 washes.

• Thick, Glued Bamboo Slats: The base of each steamer tier has slats that allow steam to come through. Models with thick, Popsicle-stick-like slats that were glued to each other side by side proved more durable than thinner, reedlike slats that were tied together with bamboo ribbons.

• Thin, Hand-Tied Bamboo Slats: We didn’t love tiers made with thin, reedlike bamboo slats that were secured to each other using even thinner hand-tied ribbons of bamboo. These slats were flimsy, and some of the ribbons broke or shredded over the course of 10 washes. These models also had more nooks and crannies for water to linger and mold to develop in, too.

• Tier Depth: Most models had tiers that were 1.6 to 2 inches deep. This proved more than adequate for steaming dumplings and small bao. But if you regularly cook taller foods (big mantou, for example), you might like a model with higher walls.