Condiment squeeze bottles for sauces

The sauce station is where we keep every condiment squeeze bottle BURIUS makes. It is the oldest part of the catalog and still the busiest, because a squeeze bottle is the one piece of kit that a home kitchen and a restaurant line agree on. Ketchup, mustard, aioli, honey, BBQ sauce, salad dressing, pancake batter, olive oil, a dessert coulis — all of it moves faster out of a plastic squeeze bottle than out of a jar with a spoon, and it lands where you aimed it.

All of our squeeze bottles are clear so you can read the level without opening the cap, and all of them are BPA-free food-safe LDPE. Clear plastic matters more than it sounds: a line cook does not want to lift twelve bottles to find the one with sauce left in it, and a cook at home does not want to discover an empty bottle halfway through plating. The bottle body stays soft after a thousand squeezes, which is the property that separates a refill bottle from a disposable one.

Sizes, and which one to fill

4 oz squeeze bottles

Plate work and a small fridge shelf. A 4 oz bottle is the one you hand to somebody decorating, because it is light enough to hold upside down for a minute without a sore wrist. Expect to refill it often; that is the trade.

8 oz squeeze bottles

The table bottle. Eight ounces is the size that holds enough ketchup for a family dinner and still fits a condiment caddy, and it is the pack most people buy first. Our 8 oz plastic squeeze bottles come in threes, sixes and tens.

12 oz squeeze bottles

The in-between size for a busy fridge door. Twelve ounces of dressing or oil lasts a week of salads without taking the shelf a 16 oz bottle needs. Narrow tip, tethered cap, same clear body.

16 oz squeeze bottles

The standard restaurant bottle. If you are stocking a griddle or a sandwich station, this is the sauce bottle to standardise on — it is the capacity the caddies, racks and bottle holders are all built around.

24 oz squeeze bottles

A long service without a refill. Twenty-four ounces is the point where the bottle starts to need two hands when it is full, so we fit a wider grip panel and keep the tip bore narrow for control.

36 oz squeeze bottles

The large squeeze bottle for a shift. At 36 oz — four and a half cups — one big bottle outlasts a 32 oz bottle by a useful margin. Wide mouth for filling and cleaning, narrow tip for dispensing.

Tips, caps and the inverted question

• A narrow tip is for precision: thin sauces, oil, a dessert drizzle, anything you want in a line rather than a puddle. A wide mouth at the other end is what makes the bottle easy to fill and easy to clean, and every bottle we make has both.
• A tethered cap stays with the bottle. It sounds trivial until you have lost three caps down a drain in a month. Our standard cap flips open, clicks shut and does not walk off the counter on its own.
• An inverted bottle stands on its head with a self-closing silicone valve in the cap, so the sauce is always at the tip and nothing crusts. It is the right choice for a thick sauce you dispense all day and the wrong choice for anything with pulp or seeds, which will eventually sit in the valve.

Filling, cleaning and keeping a bottle for years

• Hand wash. These are hand wash bottles, not dishwasher bottles — the top rack of a domestic dishwasher gets hot enough to soften the thread and the cap stops sealing. Warm water, a drop of detergent and a bottle brush does the job in half a minute.
• Fill through the wide mouth with the cap off, not through the tip. Leave a finger of air at the top so the first squeeze does not jet, and run a thick sauce through once before service so the tip is primed.
• Store them upright with the caps closed unless they are inverted bottles, which live on their heads in a rack. Dry the thread before capping a bottle you are putting away for a month, because a damp thread is the only way these ever smell.