The Best Vegetable Peeler

Though vegetable peelers may be one of the humblest kitchen tools around, you’ll find hundreds to choose from. We spoke to food and restaurant professionals to pinpoint basic criteria for a good peeler:

• Comfortable handle: Especially if you have joint pain in your hands or wrists, a comfortable grip is essential for long peeling sessions.
• Sharp, well-angled blade: A good blade makes cuts that are neither too deep nor too shallow, and it handles bumps and irregularities with ease.
• Swiveling blade: With a swiveling blade, a peeler is more comfortable to use and can peel in each direction.
• Design that doesn’t clog: We didn’t want to have to dig peels out from under the blade.
• Durable: We wanted to find peelers that would stay sharp for years and didn’t feel like they would break after rigorous use.
• Lightweight: Most industry cooks we spoke with prefer peelers that are lightweight and prevent their hands from getting tired.

While we were intrigued by a number of peelers with serrated blades, our testers found those models more limiting and useful only for specific tasks, such as removing lemon rind without the pith. If you’re planning to invest in just one peeler, it’s better to go with a regular edge.

To find the best vegetable peelers for testing, we looked to reviews from America’s Test Kitchen, Good Housekeeping, and various other publications, as well as buyer feedback on highly rated models on Amazon, to narrow our choices. We also took recommendations from a number of pros we interviewed.

Over the years, we’ve tested 11 vegetable peelers, using them with eggplant, butternut squash, celery root, carrots, potatoes, lemons, and broccoli. For good measure, we’ve thrown in a wedge of parmesan to see if each peeler can make smooth cheese shavings.

We observe how sharp the blades are on each model, how well they remove the peel from each item, and whether the blades become clogged. We also take note of any glaring comfort issues and how easy it is to grasp the peelers when they’re wet.

Highly recommended by professional chefs, the Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss Peeler peeled nearly perfectly in our tests and quickly became a favorite. It’s better than our pick from OXO for cutting thick-skinned vegetables or fruit, where you want to make a deeper cut to completely remove the skin.

It’s super sharp and lightweight. The Kuhn Rikon model peeled eggplant surprisingly well, along with butternut squash, celery root, carrots, and potatoes. It is by far the preferred peeler in professional kitchens, including at Dirt Candy, where it’s used by nearly every cook we interviewed. They praised it for its sharpness and light weight.

It’s dirt cheap and durable. At $5 or so, this model is one the least expensive peelers we’ve tested. You can easily get several for when you have multiple cooks in the kitchen. The plastic handle and casing feel a little flimsy, but we’ve talked with both home cooks and chefs who have used their Kuhn Rikon peelers for years without trouble. “I would highly recommend it,” said Jennifer Aaronson, a former editor at Martha Stewart Living. “We use them constantly and have never had a handle break or a blade dull.”

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• It feels cheaply constructed—what can you expect from a $5 peeler?—and the handle isn’t as comfortable to use as that of our pick from OXO.
• The carbon-steel blade can get rusty if exposed to acidic foods or not dried after use, but you can easily remove the rust with a green scrubby pad. The manufacturer suggests washing the peeler by hand, and then towel-drying it, immediately after use to avoid rust buildup. One chef we spoke with suggested brushing the blade with a little vegetable oil for added protection against rust.
• Some of our testers said that the Kuhn Rikon peeler created parmesan shavings that were a bit too thick. They also found that it removed too much pith when they used it to peel lemon rinds.

The clear winner for the best straight swivel peeler is the OXO Good Grips Pro Swivel Peeler. Because it creates a shallower cut, it’s better than the Kuhn Rikon model for thinner peeling, such as taking off the rind (but not the pith) from citrus and making thin cheese or chocolate curls.

It’s sharp and comfortable to use. In our tests, the OXO Pro Swivel Peeler glided more smoothly over lemons, taking just a tiny bit of pith; it also easily sliced the skin off an apple and made nice peels of parmesan. The eyer popped imperfections out of a potato without a hitch, too. The die-cast zinc bridge (the piece that connects the handle to the top of the blade) gave the peeler a wonderful weight, and the smooth silicone handle felt nicer in the hand than any of the others we encountered in our tests.

It’s solidly built and durable. We found that the blades of competing peelers all rattled slightly, giving them a cheap feeling. In contrast, even when we shook the OXO Pro Swivel Peeler, it didn’t make a peep. OXO also offers a satisfaction guarantee for all of its equipment, which isn’t the case for some of the other companies behind the models we tested. If you buy this OXO peeler and aren’t happy with it, or if it breaks shortly after purchase, just send it back for a replacement or refund.

After years of regular use, the Kuhn Rikon vegetable peeler remains a workhorse in our test kitchen. Some Wirecutter staffers who own the Kuhn Rikon model say that it continues to retain its sharp edge even after years of use.

We’ve also been long-term testing our pick from OXO since 2013, using it several times per week, and we can see no signs of corrosion or rust.

Our testers found the OXO Good Grips Pro Y-Peeler too heavy and preferred the OXO Good Grips Pro Swivel Peeler.

The OXO Good Grips Serrated Peeler worked best for parmesan and lemons, but it was unpopular among our testers, who disliked the serrated marks on the vegetables.

The Y-shaped Rösle Wide Crosswise Swivel Peeler, an all-stainless-steel model, felt high quality and peeled well, but our picks performed better for the price at the time of our testing.

The blade of the Messermeister Pro-Touch Fine Edge Swivel Peeler rattled more than that of the OXO Pro Swivel Peeler and didn’t perform as well overall.

The more basic OXO Good Grips Swivel Peeler is a best-selling peeler on Amazon, but we preferred the heavier handle and grip of the Pro version.

We also saw promising Amazon reviews for several all-stainless-steel straight peelers that lacked a bridge entirely, such as the Rada Cutlery Vegetable Peeler and the Rösle Peeler. Yet none of these came as highly recommended as the peelers we tested.

This article was edited by Marguerite Preston.