A good potato masher or ricer will not only give you smoother mashed potatoes, but can also make smashing all kinds of food—from beans to avocados—easier and even fun. After crushing over 75 pounds of food, we think the OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher is the most efficient masher you can get. For finer textures, the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer made the silkiest potatoes with minimal effort.
Everything we recommend
Our pick
This masher cuts into potatoes and other foods faster and more easily than the competition. It’s easy to clean and store, too.
Buying Options
Our pick
For even smoother potatoes, get the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer. Any ricer is harder to use and clean than a basic masher, but the Chef’n was the easiest ricer to work with of those we tested.
Buying Options
Our pick
This masher cuts into potatoes and other foods faster and more easily than the competition. It’s easy to clean and store, too.
Compared with other mashers we tried, the OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher made the best rustic yet fluffy mashed potatoes. It was also the most efficient model of its kind: With its perforated plate, it cut into potatoes and beans quickly and effortlessly. The horizontal handle offered the best leverage among the mashers we tried and made it easier to work the OXO tool around a bowl to make sure all of the ingredients were evenly incorporated. The OXO is dishwasher safe and a breeze to rinse clean. Because of its compact design, it stores easily in a drawer.
Our pick
For even smoother potatoes, get the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer. Any ricer is harder to use and clean than a basic masher, but the Chef’n was the easiest ricer to work with of those we tested.
For absolutely lump-free mashed potatoes, get the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer. Not only did it make the creamiest potatoes of any ricer we tried, but it was also the simplest to operate and clean compared with larger, more unwieldy ricers. This ricer takes a little more effort to set up, use, and clean than a masher, and it occupies more storage space. But all of that may be a worthwhile trade-off for the satiny potatoes of your dreams.
Not quite ready to decide? Save this article to come back to it later.
Why you should trust us
Wirecutter editor Winnie Yang, who wrote the 2015 version of this guide, previously worked in the food industry, with stints in a restaurant kitchen, cookware retail, and chocolate making. She also served as the managing editor of the print quarterly The Art of Eating and has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Feast, Jamie, Saveur, and Tasting Table, among other publications. Writer Anna Perling is an enthusiastic home cook and a mashed potato convert, having discovered that they’re basically a vehicle for butter and milk.
In our research, we've interviewed Lillian Chou, former food editor of Gourmet magazine and a food writer and consultant; Tim Kemp, senior manager of culinary innovation for the home cooking delivery service Blue Apron; and Raghavan Iyer, chef and author of Smashed, Mashed, Boiled, and Baked—and Fried, Too!
We also looked at coverage from other publications like Cook’s Illustrated (subscription required), Good Housekeeping, Food52, and more. And we consulted owner reviews and scoured major retailers for best-selling mashers and ricers.
Who this is for
Mashing tools come in handy for making a range of recipes, from classic mashed potatoes to guacamole, and can be a multipurpose, budget-friendly investment. Some people even use mashers to cut butter into flour while baking.
They’re also a fun tool for kids to use in the kitchen, and an easy way to get your youngest family members involved in meal prep.
Mashers versus ricers
You have several ways to mash potatoes and other foods, but we’re focusing on mashers and ricers for this guide. Some people like using food mills to create thin, smooth potato purees, but those tools are bigger, with more parts to clean, and they yield gluey results if you don’t work quickly with hot potatoes. In our tests, we preferred the fluffier and more substantial potatoes from mashers and ricers. Food mills are better suited for advanced cooks looking to make sauces, jams, and purees beyond basic mashes.
Mashers and ricers produce mashes with different consistencies. Here’s how these tools differ:
- Masher: A masher is the simpler of the two tools—just a grid plate or bent wire connected to a handle. It’s the better choice for achieving a rustic, somewhat chunky consistency. Higher-quality mashers are also capable of achieving a creamier texture, though you’ll still get some pebble-sized bits of potato. A masher is less fussy to use (no assembly required and easy to clean), and you can also whip it out to make guacamole, refried beans, or chunky applesauce.
- Potato ricer: A ricer is like a large garlic press—you squeeze cooked potatoes through a perforated hopper basket to extrude airy bits that resemble rice (hence the name). If you prefer a silky, lump-free mash, you’ll find a ricer to be a revelation. People primarily use this tool for spuds, but you can also use one to make fine-textured things like applesauce or baby food. A ricer can be more challenging to operate and clean than a masher, and since you can rice only a small portion at a time, it isn’t ideal for large quantities.
How we picked
Whether you choose a humble potato masher or a ricer, the basic strategy behind making great mashed potatoes is the same. A good masher should break up potatoes easily so that you don’t have to pound the same cells over and over again. That’s because when you cook a potato, the starch lining the cell walls absorbs the water around it and becomes a gel that fills the cell. Bad mashed potatoes happen when the cells break open, spilling the sticky gel, which then results in a mash with the consistency of library paste. For fluffy, smooth mashed potatoes, you must minimize the abuse you inflict on the potato cells, so you should mash potatoes quickly. (That’s why you should never use a hand mixer or food processor; both are punishing to those fragile, starch-filled cells.)
While researching the best mashing and ricing tools, we eliminated those that had consistent complaints and less-than-stellar ratings from Amazon reviewers, as well as those that cost more than $75, since you may not use these tools every day.
We decided not to test mashers made of nylon (sturdier stainless steel ones are widely available), and we also avoided models with a zigzag loop design, since both Cook’s Illustrated and The New York Times say that mashers with a disc plate are more efficient.
After narrowing down our criteria, we looked for mashers that had the following features:
- Perforated plate: According to our research and our interviews with experts, the best mashers have a perforated plate rather than the classic zigzag wire loop. A perforated plate can cut through potatoes more quickly and can produce a smoother mash, while the zigzag design creates a chunkier mash.
- Comfortable handles: The handle should offer good leverage, allowing you to mash without too much effort. The best handles have ergonomic, cushioned grips that curve to the shape of the hand. We also looked for handles that didn’t get slippery when wet.
- Easy to clean: Grid plates should be easy to wipe clean, and they shouldn’t get gummed up with potato while you’re mashing. We also looked for models that were dishwasher safe.
- Compact: Although some people may use their mashers frequently, others will break them out for potatoes only a few times a year, so they should be fairly small and easy to store in a drawer.
And for ricers, we looked for these criteria:
- Easy to use and hold: The best ricers have comfortable handles and a lever that efficiently forces potatoes through the hopper. The handles shouldn’t be too wide to grasp, and they shouldn’t cut into the hands. You shouldn’t have to apply a ton of force to pass potatoes through.
- Easy to clean: The best ricers have hopper baskets or perforated disks that pop out for easy cleaning. Lesser ricers are hard to disassemble and get bits of potato stuck in every crevice. Most ricers are dishwasher safe.
- Easy to store: Some ricers are exceptionally large. We looked for models that were relatively compact.
- Pot rest: A pot rest can help you steady the ricer if you have to squeeze the handles with both hands (though we found that our top pick is easy enough to squeeze without a pot rest).
- Multiple perforated plates: Some ricers have a variety of disks with different perforations for different consistencies.
How we tested
To test mashers, we measured out 1 pound of boiled potato chunks for each tool and mashed them all for about 1 minute, adding butter and milk. Our kitchen team sampled each batch of potatoes and commented on the creaminess and consistency.
We were able to eliminate a few mashers that were exceptionally awkward to use or created grainy, lumpy potatoes. Then, we mashed about 1 cup of beans with each of the remaining contenders to see how well they cut through vegetables that are tougher to mash (beans are small, slippery, and fibrous, and are harder to crush than soft potatoes).
For the ricers, we portioned out about 1 pound of boiled potato chunks for each and filled the hopper about two-thirds full (filling to the brim causes potatoes to overflow from the top), using the option with the smallest holes when the tool came with interchangeable disks. We again added butter and milk and then asked our tasting panel to weigh in on each batch of potatoes.
Since some ricers can work well for making baby food, we also made applesauce using the best-performing ricers from our mashed potato test. (The ricers did a pretty good job with the cooked apples, but overall we prefer a food mill for making purees.)
We also noted how easy or comfortable each tool was to use, how efficiently each one riced or mashed, how easy it was to assemble and disassemble (when applicable), and how easy it was to clean.
The best masher: OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher
Our pick
This masher cuts into potatoes and other foods faster and more easily than the competition. It’s easy to clean and store, too.
The OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher is the most efficient, effective masher we tested. Thanks to its combination of a plate with sharp-edged cut-outs and a U-shaped ergonomic handle, it broke up potatoes more quickly than other mashers. It also produced the smoothest, fluffiest mashed potatoes of all the mashers we looked at (second only to ricers): Its potatoes were airy and interspersed with some satisfying chunks, not gritty or gluey. The Smooth Potato Masher is dishwasher safe, too. And with its stubby shape and ergonomic horizontal handle, it’s easy to store neatly in a drawer.
The OXO has a perforated plate, with rounded holes of varying sizes. Unlike on other mashers we tested, the edges of these cutouts were sharp enough to quickly punch through potatoes for efficient mashing. Unlike mashers with dull round holes, thin vertical slits, or zigzag designs with rounded edges, the OXO masher cut through potatoes like butter, requiring minimal exertion. Mashers with, duller holes, such as the Zyliss Stainless Steel Potato Masher, flattened the potato into a pancake. And when we tried mashers with vertical slits, such as the All-Clad Potato Masher, we had to use a lot of force to push potatoes through. The OXO was also the easiest to use in our bean tests; other mashers barely cut through the beans. On top of that, we appreciate that the OXO’s grid plate didn’t clog, which made for faster, more efficient mashing, whereas those models with different perforations gummed up with potato, and we had to stop to shake or scrape the bits off.
The OXO’s short U-shaped handle allows it to offer better leverage than any other masher we tested. In contrast to a stick handle, where you’re using mostly your forearm in a straight-up-and-down motion, the OXO’s handle design lets you keep your wrist neutral and punch downward with more power to crush foods. The soft, rubbery handle helps you maintain a comfortable, firm grip even if your hand is wet.
When it comes to taste and consistency, any masher will still leave you with a few small chunks, which some people may prefer. We found that the OXO made an airy, voluminous mash, with just some small, pea-sized chunks of potato that added texture to each bite. Testers reached for spoonful after spoonful of the OXO potatoes, despite mashed potato fatigue from tasting seven batches of this rather bland food. One taste tester said, “I'm picky about mashed potatoes, and these are delicious.” Other potatoes, like the ones we made with the Zyliss and Sur la Table mashers, felt both gritty and slimy on the tongue.
The OXO was the simplest masher to clean. It’s made of one solid piece of metal, without welded joints that can gum up with potatoes or other foods. We also found that OXO’s larger holes make it easier to clean off any remaining potato bits, compared with mashers that have smaller holes or thin slits. This model is dishwasher safe, but if you’re hand washing it, we recommend rinsing the masher off right away to avoid scrubbing off dry, caked-on food later on.
We appreciate that the OXO masher doesn’t take up a lot of space, since this tool may not be one you reach for every day. With its short, squat shape, the OXO can easily fit into a drawer or a dishwasher. You can also hang it from a peg or hook.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Some Amazon reviewers complain that the short handle of the OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher causes their knuckles to drag through the mash. We didn't run into this problem, but it could be an issue if you’re working with larger amounts or have large hands. Using a wider bowl or dividing large quantities of food into several batches should help.
The OXO’s U shape means it won’t fit in a utensil crock, but it’s otherwise much more compact than other versions. If you can’t spare any drawer space, try our runner-up.
The best ricer: Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer
Our pick
For even smoother potatoes, get the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer. Any ricer is harder to use and clean than a basic masher, but the Chef’n was the easiest ricer to work with of those we tested.
For especially airy potatoes with a silky texture, we like the Chef’n FreshForce Potato Ricer. This ricer produced the best-tasting potatoes all around. Its clever design required significantly less effort to use compared with the other ricers we looked at, its handles were the easiest to hold, and its two-piece construction made it convenient to fill and clean.
The Chef’n is more ergonomic than other models because of an innovative gear mechanism and the way that the handles are attached. Ricers are basically levers with a fulcrum located at the end of the handles, on one side of the hopper. With levers, the farther the input force is from the fulcrum, the more the output force is amplified.
What Chef’n has done is place the fulcrum farther back. Instead of the simple screw hinge that every other ricer has at the fulcrum, the Chef’n ricer has a dual gear mechanism, turning this design into a compound lever that significantly increases the force applied to the potatoes when you press down on the handle—much more than in other ricers.
Chef’n claims this design makes the ricer 65 percent more efficient than other ricers. We didn’t measure the exact amount of force we used for each ricer, but we did find the Chef’n to be significantly easier to squeeze than the competition. (The same is true of the Chef’n citrus press we recommend, which uses an identical mechanism.) Although the twisting Joseph Joseph Helix Potato Ricer required little force to pass potatoes through, the handles were difficult to align with notches in the hopper, and we think that model would be cumbersome to use for large batches.
Besides being the easiest ricer to use, the Chef’n made the best mashed potatoes of all the tools we tested. Potatoes from the Chef’n ricer were cloudlike, with no grit and barely any chunks—in fact, they were some of the best homemade mashed potatoes we have ever had. Other ricers were not up to the task: The Joseph Joseph left behind sizable, gravelly bits in the mash, and the Williams Sonoma masher made slimy, mealy potatoes. The Chef’n also made good applesauce that tasted the smoothest of any batches we tried making.
The Chef’n ricer is noticeably smaller than the All-Clad and Williams Sonoma ricers, so it’s easier to grip and takes up less storage space. In comparison, the handles on the All-Clad Potato Ricer were so long and unwieldy that it felt like some sort of torture device (one that we were using to torture ourselves).
The Chef’n has a single perforated cup that easily slips into and out of the handle for filling and cleaning. Other ricers, like the OXO Good Grips 3-in-1 Adjustable Potato Ricer, have removable disks with different-size holes, which we found difficult to get on and off and didn’t produce creamier potatoes.
The Chef’n ricer can hold about a cup of potatoes when two-thirds full (filling to the rim causes potato to goosh out the top). You can fill the cup with potato and then put it back in, or pop the cup out to clean it between mashings. Other ricers we tested had baskets that stuck when we tried to remove them.
We recommend rinsing out a ricer after use to prevent foods from caking onto the basket, but if you end up with a spud-encrusted ricer, a good soak in warm or hot water should take care of it. The Chef’n is dishwasher safe too, and you can use a bottle brush to get into all those tight spaces.
The Chef’n ricer comes in just two pieces, without different-size grid plates like the OXO 3-in-1 ricer. In our tests, we didn’t notice a difference between potatoes we made with the Chef’n and those we made with the finest setting on the OXO 3-in-1 ricer. Some people may want disks with different-size holes for making chunkier foods like applesauce, but we don’t think that’s worth the effort of keeping track of all the pieces. The Chef’n also lacks a pot rest, but we didn’t find ourselves using that feature on other ricers.
The competition
Mashers
We tested an older version of the OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Potato Masher. Its rubbery handle was comfortable to hold, and it produced a mash that wasn’t gritty, with some rustic chunks, but it didn’t cut through potatoes or beans as easily as our pick. The new version is longer than the old one, so should be better for reaching into deep pots. If that’s important, or if you want a basic tool for making guacamole or mashing other foods into chunkier mixtures, we think this model is the best option.
We disliked the curved shape of the All-Clad Potato Masher, which made that model hard to move around the bowl. The vertical slits also failed to cut through potatoes well, requiring more mashing time.
The dull, round holes on the Zyliss Stainless Steel Potato Masher couldn’t punch through potatoes. This masher also has a built-in “bowl scraper” that doesn’t do much.
The straight-handle HIC Kitchen 2-in-1 Mix N' Masher wasn’t as easy to leverage as our pick, and it was more awkward to work around a bowl due to its unusual clover-like shape.
The Sur La Table Dual-Action Potato Masher has two grid plates: one perforated, and one zigzag below it. The design compresses when you push it down and then springs back. In our tests it was awkward to use, it squeaked, it didn’t make creamy potatoes, and it struggled to mash beans.
The Prepara Stainless Steel Masher produced a drier mash, and the straight handle required a little more effort for us to use. It does perform a neat trick, however: Squeeze the legs holding the mashing disc, and you can rotate the disc so the whole thing stores flat.
The Cuisipro Potato Masher seemed promising at the outset because its horizontal handle was shaped like that of the highly rated OXO Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher, and it had a plate with a greater surface area. However, we found that it was completely ineffective at mashing—it managed only to flatten the potatoes against the bottom of the bowl without breaking them up.
The HIC Kitchen Dual-Action Potato Masher stacks a plate with round perforations above a wire zigzag loop. The heaviest model of the group, it required a great deal of effort to mash with.
The spring-shaped head of the Dreamfarm Smood seemed promising—but in practice, mashing merely compressed the head and flattened the potatoes into a pancake. It also produced a gummy, pasty mash that still had large, unappetizing chunks.
Ricers
The All-Clad Potato Ricer was so unwieldy to use that it made making potatoes a pain. It’s hard to remove this model’s hopper basket, too.
The Williams Sonoma Prep Tools Potato Ricer was one of the largest tools we tested. Leveraging it was difficult; holding its wide handles and removing its hopper were, too.
We like that the Joseph Joseph Helix Potato Ricer required very little force to pass potatoes or apples through the hopper because it employed a twisting motion. But we had difficulty aligning the hopper with the top part of the ricer, and the resulting potatoes were coarse.
Although the OXO Good Grips 3-in-1 Adjustable Potato Ricer has three different plates with variably sized holes, in our tests it still didn’t produce potatoes as fluffy as the ones from the Chef’n FreshForce ricer, even on its finest setting. This model is also more difficult to assemble and take apart than our pick.
The OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Potato Ricer is a basic ricer. It made some of the smoothest potatoes in our tests, but it still required us to use more force to push food through its hopper compared with the exceptionally easy-to-use Chef’n.
The RSVP International Potato Ricer demanded somewhat more effort to use. Although the plunger had a natural tendency to flop over the opening of the hopper, unfortunately it never lined up to plunge properly, and that required us to nudge it into place first. The plastic handles bent in at the end and bled off some of the applied force, so the plate wouldn’t fully mash all of the potato every time. The handles also got slippery when wet, and overall this ricer felt flimsy next to the sturdy Chef’n. It’s nice that this tool has multiple disks, but the insert that holds the plate in place is fiddly to remove.
We weren’t able to get the cast-aluminum Norpro Deluxe Jumbo Potato Ricer to mash even the same amount as a regular-size ricer. All the potato just got jammed into one solid cake at the bottom of the hopper.
We had the same issues as the above with the RSVP International Endurance Jumbo Potato Ricer. This model required an unreasonable amount of effort yet still couldn’t pass most of the potatoes we fed into its hopper.
Sources
Raghavan Iyer, chef and author of Smashed, Mashed, Boiled, and Baked—and Fried, Too!, phone interview, August 17, 2018
Tim Kemp, senior manager of culinary innovation at Blue Apron, phone interview, September 25, 2014
Lillian Chou, food writer and consultant, phone interview, September 25, 2014
Meet your guides
Anna Perling is a former staff writer covering kitchen gear at Wirecutter. During her time at Wirecutter, she reported on various topics including sports bras, board games, and light bulbs. Previously she wrote food and lifestyle pieces for Saveur and Kinfolk magazines. Anna is a mentor at Girls Write Now and a member of the Online News Association.
Winnie Yang is the former supervising editor of Wirecutter’s appliance coverage and formerly the editor of guides to baby and parenting gear. In a previous life, she served as the managing editor of Culinary Backstreets and The Art of Eating, and she has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Feast, Jamie, Saveur, and Tasting Table, among other publications.
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