BALCI 2-Quart Ice Cream Containers (Set of 2) Review: 10 Months In

I make homemade ice cream about once a month. It’s a small ritual in our house — pick a flavor, run the machine, eat the fresh batch over the next several days. The part I never quite got right was the storage.

For years I used cheaper plastic containers from the grocery store. They worked, mostly. The lids were hard plastic, they warped a little in the dishwasher, and I could never get them fully clean because the corners where the lid meets the rim held onto residue. I kept using them anyway, because I didn’t know there was a better option for this kind of job.

These BALCI tubs replaced those containers about ten months ago. I haven’t gone back.

What It Is

It’s a set of two 2-quart containers, one blue and one red, made from BPA-free plastic. They stack on top of each other in the freezer, which matters when you’re trying to fit two batches into a crowded drawer. The bodies are hard plastic. The lids are a flexible rubbery material that bends when you peel it off the rim.

It runs $29.99 for the pair, which works out to about $15 per container. Amazon shows 4.8 stars. Both the tubs and the lids are listed as dishwasher safe, and I can confirm that’s the case after ten months of regular use.

Living With It

The thing that sold me was the lids. They’re rubbery and flexible, which sounds like a small detail until you’ve spent five minutes trying to pry a hard plastic lid off a frozen tub, or chipped a corner in the process. The BALCI lids flex instead of fight. You pull a corner back, peel it around the rim, and it comes off in one motion. When you put it back on, the flexible material conforms to the tub’s rim on its own. There’s no clip to line up, no tab to press. It just seats itself.

That sounds like marketing language. It isn’t. The seal is firm enough that if I leave a tub in the freezer for a full week, I don’t get the ice crystals across the top that I used to get with my old hard-lid containers. That tells me air isn’t moving in and out the way it was before.

Stacking turned out to matter more than I expected. Two 2-quart tubs in a freezer drawer take less vertical room than I figured, and they sit flat without wobbling. After ten months of opening and closing the drawer around them, no cracks at the corners and no stress marks.

Cleaning is straightforward. Both the tubs and the lids go in the dishwasher together, and after ten months of regular cycles there’s no clouding, no warping, and no cracking at the corners. The interior corners are rounded, which means there’s no inside edge for residue to hide in. That’s the part that used to frustrate me with my old containers.

What I Liked

• The lids. Flexible, conform to the rim, peel off cleanly. The single best feature.
• Writeable surface. You can write on the lid or the tub body, so labeling a flavor is one swipe of a marker — no stickers, no tape.
• Stackability. Saves real space in a crowded freezer drawer.
• Rounded interior corners. Easier to scoop from and easier to actually clean.
• Dishwasher durability. Ten months in, no warping or clouding on either the tubs or the lids.

What Annoyed Me

Honestly: I couldn’t find anything that bothered me enough to mention. Ten months in, the lids still seal, the plastic still looks new, and nothing’s cracked or warped. I keep waiting for the thing that’s slightly off about these containers, and it hasn’t shown up. The only honest quibble I can frame is that the $30 set costs more than a grocery-store tub, but that’s the cost of dishwasher-safe lids that hold up — and given that this is the set I keep reaching for, it’s the kind of upgrade that’s earned, not inflated.

Who It’s For / Who Should Skip

These are for someone who makes ice cream at home often enough that storage is a recurring problem, not a one-off question. If you’re running a churn once a month like me, or more, the difference between these and cheaper containers shows up in everyday use — easier lids, better stacking, longer-lasting materials.

Skip them if you make ice cream once a year and freeze the rest in loaf pans under plastic wrap. Skip them if freezer space is genuinely tight and you only ever store one tub at a time, because the stacking benefit won’t pay off. And if a $30 set is a stretch in your budget, the cheaper containers still work — they’re just a little more annoying to live with.

Verdict + Grade

These replaced my old containers cleanly, and I haven’t reached for the old ones once in the ten months since. The lids are the reason, and everything else about the tubs supports that. I’d buy them again.

Grade: A

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For the nerds:

Spec	Value
Capacity (per tub)	2 qt (1.89 L)
Set size	2 tubs, 2 lids
Tub material	BPA-free hard plastic
Lid material	Flexible silicone-style polymer
Dishwasher safe	Yes (tubs and lids, per Al’s 10 months of regular cycles)
Freezer safe	Yes
Stackable	Yes
Listed price	$29.99

Technical notes:

• The flexible lid relies on compression around the rim rather than a clip, thread, or latch. That keeps the wall thickness of the tub itself constant, which is part of why the interior corners are easy to clean.
• BPA-free is the only plastic-safety claim in the listing. There’s no specific dishwasher-cycle temperature rating published, though standard top-rack cycles (typically under 150°F) haven’t affected the lids after ten months of regular use.