For most cooks the best garlic press is the OXO Good Grips Garlic Press, and the reason is that it removes the two things people hate about presses: peeling and cleaning. Its heavy die-cast body crushes a clove with the skin still on, and a built-in cleaner pops through the holes to push the pulp out. It is comfortable, effective, and priced so that buying it is an easy call.
When to spend up on the Kuhn Rikon
The Kuhn Rikon Epicurean Garlic Pressis the upgrade, and it earns its premium in one way: leverage. Its long stainless handles crush a clove with almost no hand effort, which matters if you have weak grip strength or you press garlic most days. It is also the more durable object — a solid piece of stainless that will outlast a die-cast press by years. What you give up is the pop-out cleaning tool, so it takes a little more rinsing at the sink.
Which one for you
Buy the OXO if you want the easiest all-round press and the self-cleaning feature — which is to say, if you are like most people. Buy the Kuhn Rikon if you press garlic constantly, want the lowest possible effort per clove, or simply prefer to buy once and never replace it. Neither is a wrong answer; the OXO is just the one that fits the most kitchens for the least money.
There is one reader for whom that ordering flips completely. A garlic press is the hardest routine squeeze in a domestic kitchen, and if grip strength is the constraint, the Kuhn Rikon’s long-handled leverage stops being a luxury and becomes the point. Our kitchen tools for arthritic hands roundup ranks it first for exactly that reason, alongside the other tools whose makers publish a mechanism that replaces hand force.
And there is one reader for whom a press is the wrong category altogether: anyone mincing half a head at a time, or wanting garlic in an emulsion. A press crushes clove by clove, where a small bowl chopper minces the lot in two pulses and — if its lid has oil holes — turns that into aioli without stopping. The best food chopper for garlic ranks those machines, and explains why a press still wins for two cloves.
How we picked
Tools we claim to have lab-tested: 0
Every site in this category tells you they ran twenty machines through a lab. We have not, and we say so. Here is what we do instead: read the manufacturer's manual and spec sheet, record the published bowl capacity, motor rating, blade and disc counts and materials, cross-check the warranty against the manufacturer's own warranty document, and cite all of it so you can check the work. Prices come live from Amazon's API and disappear rather than go stale.
The scores above are judgments from that documented research — not test results. The full rubric, including what disqualifies a product, is published in full.
