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By Jarrett Melendez and Alaina Chou
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Tell any cooking enthusiast that you’re on a hunt for the best garlic press and you’ll find that it’s a surprisingly controversial topic. Many people would rather use a chef’s knife or a Microplane, and while these tools work well for small portions of minced garlic, they can become tedious to deal with when a recipe calls for copious amounts of the stuff. If you’ve ever slogged through chopping and chopping endless cloves on a cutting board, you know this all too well. Here at Epi, we don’t tend to recommend uni-taskers unless they’re really the best tools for the job and promise to change your cooking for the better. The best garlic presses will actually do that.
The truth is that garlic press design has come a long way since those older models—you know, the ones that pinch your fingers, can press only one small clove at a time, and are impossible to clean. After crushing countless cloves of garlic using 10 garlic presses from leading brands, we’ve discovered some really great ones out there even for dedicated garlic mincers. And don’t worry, none of the garlic went to waste. Some went into a recipe that night and the rest is fermenting away with a handful of other ingredients to make ginger-garlic paste. Read on for our top picks and for more about the presses you should steer clear of, scroll further down.
Best garlic press overall Another good garlic press Best budget garlic press How we tested What we looked for Other presses we tested The takeaway
You may recognize this brand as the maker of the much-coveted Pepper Cannon, which has been praised by a number of food media personalities and won our product test for Best Pepper Grinder. Naturally, we had high hopes for Männkitchen’s heavy-duty garlic press, and it absolutely did not disappoint. Every component of the press is made from stainless steel, so it’s rust and corrosion resistant, which also means it’s dishwasher-safe.
Our pick for best press features a cupless design, which means that the mesh plate that the garlic gets pushed through swings on the same hinge as the handles. You just hold the press open with one hand, holding the mesh plate in place with your thumb, load in your garlic—we found that two cloves fit in pretty consistently—and then squeeze the handles together. The mesh plate swings out, which makes for really easy cleaning: Most of the garlic skin that remains in the press slides out easily. A quick rinse under the faucet will send any remaining pieces of garlic skin flying down the garbage disposal.
Aside from its ease of use, we were impressed with how sturdy the press felt too. It has extra-wide ergonomic handles that are extremely comfortable to hold, even after crushing 20 cloves of garlic. And the best part of all? No pinched fingers.
There’s not much we didn’t like about this press—it functions incredibly well and is built to last. The one thing to note is that it doesn’t have some of the nifty extra features that our budget pick boasts, which means you’ll have to scrape the minced garlic from the press with a utensil or finger. Other than that, price is the only real downside to our top pick.
Männkitchen Stainless Steel Garlic Press
So, this garlic press is almost 100% identical to the Männkitchen model. It’s also been around longer, so it felt strange to consider this one the “Another Good” model and not the Best Overall, especially with a price difference of only $4 (the Männkitchen press is $50, and this one is $54). Remove the branding from these and you might be hard-pressed (sorry) to find the differences, so we can confidently recommend the Kuhn Rikon as another solid option.
There is one tiny (and we mean tiny) difference that set the Kuhn Rikon back just a hair: The holes on the mesh plate on this model were slightly smaller than the Männkitchen’s. We found that the garlic skin was ever so slightly harder to remove from this one. And…that’s really it. We really had to search for the differences in performance here, and they were so small that we can wholeheartedly recommend both of these presses.
Kuhn Rikon Epicurean Garlic Press
At just $25 at the time of publication, this is a really solid garlic press, though it may not look it. At first glance, the all-plastic construction, apart from the metal mesh plate, looks cheap and flimsy. It doesn’t feel even remotely as sturdy as the Männkitchen or Kuhn Rikon (the handles are a little flexible when you squeeze), but after crushing clove after clove of garlic, we have no reason to believe this press would break any time soon. The large capacity hopper was the biggest of all the models tested and was consistently able to accommodate two or three large cloves.
This press also had a couple of cool features that made using and cleaning it easier than others. The first is a set of ridges and a flat bar attachment on the head of the press that, when you swing the press all the way open, scrapes the minced garlic off the press and pushes any leftover garlic skin off the plate. This means you don’t need to dirty your hands or a utensil to get the newly chopped garlic from the press into your marinade or pasta dish. With the garlic press open all the way, there’s a convenient little lever you can push with your thumb that ejects the garlic skin, breaking contact with the mesh plate, which makes it really easy to rinse the skin away. Like the other two winning presses, this one is dishwasher-safe, but the extra-wide hopper makes it just as easy to hand-wash.
The flimsier look and feel is the main downside of this garlic press. Other than that, we noticed that it left behind a bit more garlic skin waste than some of the other presses we used (though it’s worth noting that this made that skin easier to remove in one piece).
Dreamfarm Garject Lite Garlic Press
We started by crushing a single clove of peeled garlic in each press to see how much or little waste they created (Editor’s note: You can press unpeeled garlic, it’s just messier and you lose some garlic along the way). Across the board, they all performed pretty similarly here. The size of garlic bits were all fairly comparable, and the amount of waste produced was minimal. So, rather than focus on that, we tested mostly for comfort, design, and ease of cleaning.
After the initial test, we continued crushing more cloves of garlic with each press, focusing on how comfortable they were to hold, how sturdy they felt, and then how easy it was to remove the garlic skins and wash the press after the fact.
Any handheld kitchen tool should be comfortable to use, especially when it’s something that tests your grip strength, like a garlic press. We looked for presses with handles that fit well in our hands and didn’t cause fatigue even after extended use.
The whole point of a garlic press is to make working with garlic easier. If it took longer to get a clean garlic press than it would take to chop a clove by hand, well, that defeated the purpose of using the garlic press in the first place.
This is somewhat tied to comfort, but we were drawn to presses with larger hoppers that made it easy to load in the cloves. Bonus points went to presses that could press more than one clove at a time.
This press comes with a little red cleaning tool you can use to scrape out the garlic skin (one side is a scraper, the other looks like a cleaning brush but is made of rigid plastic to press into the holes). At first, this seemed like a great idea. The built-in cleaner snapped into the handle, but would pop out about 75% of the time when we were crushing cloves. The simple solution to that is to pop it out and leave it on the counter as you crush garlic, but then you could just use a fork or the tip of a steak knife instead. The handles are really skinny, which makes it difficult to squeeze with just one hand. The company does claim this works specifically with unpeeled cloves, though those weren’t tested to keep everything uniform.
This was the flimsiest garlic press we tried in our initial round of testing. It also had the smallest hopper, which could really only fit small- to medium-size cloves in it. The mesh plate lifts out, theoretically to make it easier to clean, but it was so narrow that we had trouble getting all of the little bits out. We also felt that the plate would be easy to lose since it comes out so easily—in fact, associate editor Jarret Melendez almost lost the thing down his garbage disposal when he was trying to clean it off.
Overall, we liked this press. It’s a very simple design with no removable parts. The hopper is big and, like our budget pick, has raised bumps on the back of the lever that help push the garlic skin off of the mesh plate. The nonslip handles are big and comfortable, as expected from an Oxo product, and it felt sturdy during use. Honestly, the main reasons this wasn’t our Budget Pick are because the hopper wasn’t quite as big and it wasn’t as easy to clean as the Dreamfarm.
OXO Good Grips Soft-Handled Garlic Press
Though this press is made of metal rather than plastic, the aluminum gave it a slightly flimsy feel. It worked decently, and we liked the idea of being able to slice and mince garlic with the same tool, but we found that those slices were difficult to remove in one piece, and that the extra parts the slicer entailed made for a gadget that was harder to clean. All that said, the main reason we felt the Zulay fell short was that its construction is such that if you try to close it at the wrong angle, it will get stuck thanks to the freely dangling pusher pieces.
Zulay Kitchen 2-in-1 Garlic Press
These two presses were nearly identical, came with identical cleaning brushes and garlic peeler accessories, and worked identically too. They’re fine options for stainless-steel presses that are far less expensive than our winning picks, but we preferred the extra features and wide hopper of the Dreamfarm for a budget pick within a similar price range.
Alpha Grillers Stainless Steel Garlic Press
Orblue Stainless Steel Garlic Press
This garlic press was different from any other we tried because, well, it’s not technically a press. Instead of inserting cloves into a hopper and pressing down to push them through small holes, you place the Joseph Joseph garlic rocker on top of a clove and rock it back and forth to force the garlic through. It’s a good option for those who can’t use or grip the typical style of press for one reason or another, but we found that the holes were too big to produce the type of fine mince we were looking for, and we disliked the necessity of dirtying a cutting board or surface in order to use it. The one upside to the rocker style is that it leaves behind very little waste.
Lots of chefs and experienced home cooks like to look down their noses at these handy little kitchen gadgets, and we’re ashamed to admit that we were once among them. But after spending time with some really high-quality, well-designed presses? Consider us converted. They are a worthwhile tool for the home cook. If you want the best garlic crusher, go for the ones made by Männkitchen or Kuhn Rikon. Want to spend a little less? You could do a lot worse than the one made by Dreamfarm.
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