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Welcome to Buy This Thing, a column dedicated to the kitchen products and home goods Eater writers and industry pros obsess over. Silicone Mushie Bibs
I drink a lot of iced coffee, and so, I go through a lot of ice. For a long time, I used whatever ice trays came in my freezer, either left behind by past tenants or by former roommates. I had a stint with the Joseph Joseph QuickSnap, but since the ice cubes didn’t always snap out so easily, I’d wedge in a butter knife to help loosen them. That is, until the day — many mornings of this later — that I noticed little white flecks in my iced coffee and realized only then that I had been scraping off plastic along with the ice cubes.
So, put off by the amount of plastic I’d been drinking, I upgraded to silicone ice cube trays. These are wonderful, in theory: The trays come in multiple size options, and the ice always comes out cleanly, with just a little twist. Then, of course, there is the reality of silicone ice cube trays: While ice doesn’t really stick to silicone, smells certainly do. And no matter how clean I kept my freezer nor how often I swapped out the baking soda inside it, the silicone tray and any ice made in it picked up an unwelcome funk. There are ways to fix this, sure, but it also doesn’t feel like too big an ask to want ice cube trays that don’t require constant maintenance.
Unimpressed by the alternatives from major kitchen goods retailers, I ended up on Amazon, where the Phinox ice cube tray with lid and bin immediately appealed to me, in part because of its smart design, which maximizes the amount of ice I could make, and also because of its cute colors. My new ice tray — which is an adorable pink — has changed my mornings for the better.
For $14 as of this writing, you get two ice cube trays that, together, make 64 cubes of ice, as opposed to the 14 cubes of most other ice cube trays. Not only do those trays stack on top of each other, they also fit snugly atop a bin for storing the ice — so much function within the same footprint as a standard tray!
Although the molds of these ice cube trays are indeed made of silicone, they have an upside over the ones I’d been using: They come with a lid that fits snugly over the top to keep smells out. That lid does double duty too. Inside the lid is a plate with soft, pokey nubs of plastic. To release the ice cubes from the tray, you simply turn each tray upside down over the bin, put the lid on top, and then press down with some force so the nubs can push all the cubes out at once.
Another upside? Every time I press the ice out, I feel like one of those chiropractor influencers doing a back adjustment. My ice is always fresh, it never runs out, and my morning iced coffee has never been better.
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