Potato Ricer vs Masher

Use a ricer if you want smooth, fluffy, genuinely lump-free mash, gnocchi dough, or anything where texture is the point. Use a masher if you want rustic mash with some body to it, or you are mashing something other than potato. And use a food processorfor neither — that is the one that produces glue.

What each tool does to the starch

A cooked potato is a mass of cells packed with swollen starch granules. Handle them gently and they separate into individual, fluffy grains. Rupture them and the starch escapes as a sticky gel, and the mash turns gluey. Everything about this comparison follows from that one fact.

A ricer forces the potato through small holes in a single pass. The cells separate rather than burst, which is why riced potato is light and completely lump-free, and why the classic technique for the fluffiest mash is to rice hot potato straight into warm butter and milk.

A mashercrushes from above, repeatedly. Some cells rupture, and how many depends entirely on how long you keep going — which is why mash made with a masher is fine when you stop early and heavy when you do not. That is not a flaw; a slightly denser, more textured mash is what a lot of people actually want.

A blade— a food processor, a blender or a stick blender — ruptures effectively every cell within seconds. The result is wallpaper paste, and it is irreversible. This is the single most common food processor mistake, and it is covered in what a food processor can and cannot do.

The comparison table

The honest case for keeping a masher

A ricer only really does one thing well. A masher does colcannon, champ, mashed swede, refried beans, guacamole, mashed banana and the sweet potato for a pie — and it does them in the pot, with nothing to load in batches. If you mash once a month, a masher is the more sensible drawer occupant. Our potato masher roundup covers which one to buy, and why a wire head and a perforated plate are not the same tool.

The ricer earns its space if mash is a point of pride, if you make gnocchi, or if you are feeding people who notice lumps. It is also the easier tool for large quantities, because ricing is fast once you have a rhythm and mashing a big pot by hand is genuinely hard work. Our potato ricer roundupranks the two we recommend — the OXO Good Grips Stainless Steel Potato Ricer for most kitchens and the Bellemain Large Potato Ricer (3 discs) when you want a choice of disc coarseness.

What about a food mill?

A food millsits between the two and is worth knowing about: it presses food through a perforated disc with a rotating blade, giving a result close to a ricer’s while also removing skins and seeds. For potato it is a very good substitute for a ricer. Its real advantage is elsewhere — tomato sauce, apple sauce and berry purees, where the skin-and-seed removal is the whole point.