The 5 Best Spiralizers for 2023

Aug 12, 2023

Use this tool for more than zoodles.

Sarah Karnasiewicz is an award-winning writer, editor, and cook. In addition to Food & Wine, she has contributed to Everyday with Rachael Ray, Epicurious, Food Network, and Cooking Light, among others. Sarah is the features editor for The Wall Street Journal's Off Duty lifestyle section.

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The best spiral vegetable slicer should do more than just crank out zucchini noodles — it should marry design and function so seamlessly that you find yourself looking for excuses to add spiralized vegetables to every meal. Aside from creating vegetable ribbons for stir fry, salads, stews, and low-carb pasta, this powerful tool can also make quick work of basic prep tasks like slicing, grating, and shredding. To help you find the best spiralizer for your kitchen, we tested a variety of options on the market, considering their design, blades, sturdiness, smoothness, and cleanup.

We love this OXO option because it's durable and efficient. While the basic elements of the OXO apparatus were the same as the other models we tested — molded plastic construction, a hand crank, suction cup stabilization, three blades for spaghetti, fettuccine, and ribbon cuts — when it came to function, it outperformed every competitor. It was easy to assemble, the base felt sturdier, the suction grip held tighter, the crank held firmly to every sort of produce we threw at it, and it turned more smoothly and with less force.

What's the design tweak that accounts for the improved suction? Rather than one small suction cup at each corner of the base, this OXO model uses a supersized suction cup on the bottom that attaches and releases using a lever and gives a stronger hold.

The OXO blades are sharp and come color-coded, which makes it easy to know which blade you are grabbing at a glance. A small plastic case is also provided for safely stashing the blades when not in use, and it tucks neatly inside the box if you're storing the whole apparatus together. The body of the spiralizer is easy to wipe down after use, and the blades are dishwasher safe for easy cleaning.

Price at time of publish: $48

Amazon

Sturdy, with good suction to keep it in place on the counter and sharp blades, this Paderno spiralizer was a solid contender. If space is not an issue in your kitchen, it could compete with the OXO Good Grips 3-Blade Spiralizer. A couple of caveats: the suction, while strong, still needed occasional readjustment and the blades sometimes clogged after lengthy use, requiring a little extra cleaning.

Price at time of publish: $25

In addition to being the priciest option on this list, this spiralizer requires the initial investment of a KitchenAid stand mixer. But using this attachment is as easy as mixing or whipping ingredients with the stand mixer, and the results are clean and consistent. Its five blades let you slice, spiralize, and peel produce of various sizes, with separate blades for fruits with a small core and a large core. You can also opt for seven blades, adding an extra-fine spiralizer blade and thin-slice small core attachment to the mix. With either option, the attachment will likely change the way you peel apples and potatoes. The blades are dishwasher safe and easy to hand wash if you prefer.

The Hamilton Beach 3-in-1 Electric Vegetable Spiralizer is an easy-to-use electric option. It stands out for its streamlined design, which resembles a juicer with its long chute and pusher tool — only this one is equipped with a metal grip to hold your vegetables in place. It has three cutting cone blades to create uniform-sized noodles, which include spaghetti, linguine, and spirals. Aside from its electric motor, its catch-all bowl is what makes it a must-have. It's able to hold six cups' worth of spirals and is dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning. For an electric model, it has a quiet motor and it is able to handle zucchini and other thin pieces of produce, but it has a reputation for being particularly finicky with tougher foods like sweet potatoes and carrots.

Price at time of publish: $50

The OXO Good Grips 3-Blade Hand-Held Spiralizer is ideal for small spiralizing tasks. It's compactly designed and has a nonslip grip for comfortable control over your spirals while also protecting you from its stainless steel blades. You have three choices of noodle sizes and the blades are color-coated to simplify the process. Though it offers a stable grip, you get the best spirals when using zucchinis with thicker widths. If it's not the right girth, it will result in some mushy noodles.

Price at time of publish: $26

While certainly serviceable, we found that it didn't perform as consistently well as others — firm vegetables like carrots and beets sometimes wobbled out of place during cranking, and the suction cup feet invariably needed reattaching.

Operated with a convenient crank handle, the Mueller Pro Multi-Blade Spiralizer uses four stainless steel blades: straight accordion style, angel hair, finely shredded, and thick chip style. While it simplifies the spiralizing process and works well with a variety of vegetable widths, it can be hard to clean, and its suction cups don't always stay in place on countertops.

Though very similar in appearance to the Paderno and Spiralizer models, the Brieftons 5-Blade Spiralizer fell short in performance. The toothed grip on the handle tends to lose hold on firmer vegetables, resulting in uneven cuts and the inconvenience of stopping and starting repeatedly. In addition, the blades were sometimes hard to change. Toward the end of testing, one became so stuck in place that we eventually just abandoned it for our safety.

As the demand for spiralizers has exploded, so has the supply: Shoppers now have more than a dozen models from which to choose. At first glance, many of them look nearly identical. Luckily most machines fall into two general categories: countertop models and handheld models. Countertop models are about the size of a large shoebox and operate in much the same manner as an old-fashioned apple peeler, with a toothed grip to the produce and a crank handle that guides the fruit or vegetable against the blade.

Handheld spiralizers are much more compact and are designed to fit in the palm of your hand. They require the cook to put more muscle into the job—which is fine when you're working with tender produce like zucchini or cucumbers, but can end in tears with something firmer like butternut squash, turnips, or beets. Finally, because handheld spiralizers generally have only one fixed blade, the variety of shapes they put at your disposal is necessarily limited. Ultimately, the main selling point of handheld spiralizers is their convenient, compact size. If you suspect you might reach for the gadget on a less regular basis—or, if kitchen real estate is at a premium—a handheld slicer might be the right choice for you.

All the spiralizers we surveyed included the three most common blades: a flat one designed for wide "fettuccine"-type slices and vegetable chips, plus both small and large julienne blades, capable of producing delicate "angel hair" and all-purpose "spaghetti" vegetable noodle shapes. A couple of the models tested include additional blades for coarse and fine shredding. Moderately inexpensive but not super cheap, all the handheld models fall, generally, in the $25 to $45 price range, and are constructed from a similar molded white plastic.

Considering the central element of a spiralizer is a sharp blade, the relative stability and sturdiness of each model was also a prime consideration. Most countertop spiralizers rely on a system of suction cups to affix to a work surface for wobble-free cranking. Models that dislodged during use were automatically downgraded (though ones that were impossible to remove after the work was finished also lost a point for minor annoyance). Another factor that seemed essential to stability was the weightiness of the base: models with smaller, lighter bases tended to feel off balance in comparison to their heftier counterparts.

A worthy spiralizer should do more than just crank out zucchini noodles—it should marry design and function so seamlessly that you find yourself looking for excuses to swirl, shred, and slice, adding vegetables to every meal just for the fun of it. And we found one model that did just that, as well as a bargain model that's ideal for compact kitchens.

Over the course of three days, we sliced and swirled our way through a variety of fruits and vegetables, including tender zucchini and squash, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes and Granny Smith apples. (And afterwards, used the haul to make big batches of vegetable chips, frittatas and grated salads). With all the models, we paid close attention to the smoothness of the cutting action, the sharpness of the blades, the size and sturdiness of the overall apparatus, and the ease of cleanup.

When it came time to slice, the best models sliced both softer and firmer items evenly without requiring a lot of stopping and starting. Their crank system turned smoothly, and didn't drop the produce or wobble out of position. (Or, our pet peeve: squeak). We also considered the sharpness and variety of the blades. All of the models we tested came with the three "essential" blades—but having more options wasn't necessarily a plus.

Clever blade storage also won points. To prevent accidental injuries, we looked for spiralizers that provided somewhere safe and convenient to stash the blades when not in use—preferably on the body of the base. While rinsing and cleaning the blades was invariably fussy, no matter the model, we evaluated how easy the crevices were to clear and how well the blade's plastic surrounds withstood staining and scratching.

With a spiralizer, you can not only also achieve pasta-like shapes, such as extra-long julienne spirals to ribbon curls, but also peel vegetables for everyday use, according to Melissa Ledbetter, Director of Marketing and E-commerce at Kuhn Rikon. "Spiralizers are small in size and easy to store, affordable, and easy to clean," says Ledbetter. "The major con is that a spiralizer doesn't work on all fruits and vegetables."

"Many foods can work well with a spiralizer. Hand-held versions tend to work best with smaller and softer veggies, like zucchini and summer squash," says Ledbetter. Larger countertop spiralizers with stabilizers can work on hardier produce, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and other root vegetables, as well as firmer fruits like apples and pears. Your spiralizer should come with some basic instructions on the best produce to use.