How to Make a Bowl in Minecraft: 3 Planks Make 4 Bowls

Place 3 planks in a V shape on a crafting table: one on the left of the middle row, one on the right of the middle row, and one in the center of the bottom row. You get 4 bowls. Any wood works and the planks can be mixed.

Since bowls only come from crafting and you get them back after eating, you’ll rarely need more than a handful.

What goes in a bowl

• Mushroom stew. Any two mushrooms and a bowl. Before Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.50 it had to be one red and one brown; now red, brown and the new shelf mushroom all work in any mix. Restores 6 hunger.
• Beetroot soup. Six beetroots and a bowl. Also 6 hunger.
• Rabbit stew. Cooked rabbit, a carrot, a baked potato, any mushroom and a bowl. The most filling of the four at 10 hunger, but fiddly to make. Rabbits live in deserts, flower forests and snowy areas; see the rabbit page.
• Suspicious stew. Two mushrooms, a flower and a bowl. Eating it gives a short status effect that depends on the flower: an oxeye daisy gives Regeneration, a dandelion gives Saturation, and so on. Some flowers give bad effects, like poison from lily of the valley.

Mooshrooms: stew from a cow

The best reason to carry a bowl is a mooshroom. Use a bowl on a red mooshroom and you get mushroom stew straight away, as many times as you like. Bring one back from a mushroom fields biome and you have unlimited food with nothing to plant.

Brown mooshrooms give suspicious stew instead if you feed them a flower first.

Stew or something else?

Stews fill you up well, but they don’t stack: each takes a whole inventory slot. That makes them good food to eat at your base and a poor choice for exploring. For trips, carry bread, baked potatoes or cooked meat, which stack to 64. If you’re setting up food at home, starting a farm covers wheat, carrots, potatoes and beetroots.

Other uses

• A bowl is fuel in a furnace, though a weak one.
• Bowls can be crafted with a crafting table only, not in your 2×2 inventory grid.