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Picture this: It’s a holiday weekend. Your house is full of friends and family. You’re constantly cleaning the kitchen after shared meals, which means putting away the half-finished casseroles and pasta dishes you baked in heavy stoneware and cast-iron pans. Unless you want to use a lot of plastic wrap (and wrestle with getting it to properly cover these sizable dishes), there’s not a great solution for storing these things. You could cut pieces of the lasagna and stack them in reusable containers, but that creates extra work and extra dishes. And you’re trying to spend more time with your house guests (maybe).
What if you could reach for a simple pieces of plastic that stretches easily over that casserole dish, cinches itself, and creates a barrier between your green beans and the arid environment of the fridge?
What you need is an elastic food storage cover, a.k.a. a glorified shower cap. I first learned about these covers when I launched a sourdough bread company. All of our breads require an overnight fermentation, so I’m constantly covering and uncovering dough. Using elastic covers allows me to cover loaves quickly, without dealing with plastic wrap.
As my bakery expands, we’ve started covering bread on speed racks in bulk for chilling. But sometimes I’ll be experimenting with a new loaf that I want to keep separate from the batch, or I’ll make bread when visiting friends and family out of state (yes, I travel with my sourdough starter and a feeding and baking kit; you don’t?). When I have a single loaf or two that needs to be covered during fermentation, I reach for a shower cap. I’m not unique in this regard—plenty of bakers do this too; Challenger Breadware even offers its own brand of dough covers.
I’ve come to believe that shower caps are a home baker’s essential. But, as I alluded to above, they’re actually far more versatile. I keep a stash in my kitchen—to cover those aforementioned casserole dishes, but also to pop over mixing bowls. (Say you need to separate yolks and eggs and plan on using the whites later. Instead of dirtying another dish by transferring them to a lidded container, use a shower cap and toss the already-dirty bowl in the fridge.) Prepping a cheese board or crudités board that you need to drive somewhere? Plastic wrap will stick and smoosh everything down, but a shower cap keeps everything fresh without squeezing the life out of it.
Shower caps are inexpensive, easy to rinse out (use warm water and a soapy sponge, then let them air-dry on a dish rack), and especially helpful in cases when food wraps and storage containers are annoying to deal with—when you just need to cover something that’s a weird shape. Use them on your lasagna, use them on that dessert you’re serving at a dinner party, use them on your bread…just make sure to buy a separate one to use on your head.
