To Find the Best Potato Ricers, I Made 18 Pounds of Mashed Potatoes

Its sturdy body is comfortable to maneuver and easily disassembles into two dishwasher-safe halves. When I’m staring down the barrel of a five-pound bag of potatoes that need to be mashed, I would love to use my food processor or stand mixer.

Cooked potatoes go into a perforated hopper basket, then a lever is pressed down to push the potatoes through small holes (generally the size of a grain of rice, hence ‘potato ricer’). After 18 pounds of mashed potatoes, I landed on three top picks. - Potato Test: I tested the ricers by, well, ricing potatoes.

I used each one to make a batch of Kenji’s Ultra Fluffy Mashed Potatoes, noting how easy it was to load with cooked potatoes, the time it took to rice them, and the final consistency of the mashed potatoes. - Cleanup Test: I then washed each potato ricer by hand to evaluate the cleaning process. Hollow handles with metal edges (like those on the Bellemain and Priority Chef) pressed into my hands. Fingers unpleasantly, while solid handles (like the handles on the Norpro and Chef’n) were more comfortable to use.

While this might be useful if you have plans to rice a variety of vegetables, if you’re mainly going to be using your ricer for potatoes, the extra parts seem unnecessary. As long as the holes were relatively small—between 1/16- and 1/8-inch—the resulting potatoes will come out silky smooth. The hopper baskets on some models (like the RSVP and OXO) had holes only on the bottom (like a garlic press), while others had holes on the sides as well (like the Norpro and Williams Sonoma).

The Criteria: What to Look for in a Potato Ricer A good potato ricer should have an uncomplicated design with sturdy construction. The ricer is comprised of two separate pieces: The bottom half houses the hopper basket, while the top is cylindrical with a spiraled canal around the sides that screws snugly into the basket.

After loading the basket with potatoes, you line up the two halves of the press using the red dots on either side for guidance, and then press the two handles together. This twists the cylinder on the top and screws it down into the steel basket, pushing the riced potato out of the bottom.

This unorthodox design had no downsides: It was easy to load potatoes into the hopper without the top half of the ricer in the way, there were fewer surfaces to scrape potatoes from, the handles were comfortable, and the twisting motion required less effort than traditional ricers. On top of all of that, the detachable halves and crevice-free design made it one of the easiest models to clean.

What we liked: If you’d prefer a more traditional potato ricer, this model from Chef’n is a great option. While many models included plungers and hopper baskets made of stainless steel, resulting in an unpleasant metal-on-metal scraping when pressing the ricer shut, the plunger on this model is made of the same plastic as the body.

What we liked: If you’re after a model that can accommodate a whole potato in its hopper, this is a good option. It has comfortable handles and perforations on all sides of the hopper, allowing potatoes to move through easily.

The only difference is that the sides of the hopper basket are perforated as well as the bottom. I found that extra holes offer little more than another surface to scrape potatoes from, but if you’d like more holes, this model is slightly lower priced than the Chef’n. - RSVP International Spud Potato Ricer: This is a solid ricer, though it did feel a tad flimsier than other models.