Its curved chrome body was easy to grip, its hinged fulcrum provided great leverage, and its parts were sturdy and opened and closed smoothly without snapping at our fingers. But what made this mid-priced corkscrew a keeper is its Teflon-coated worm, which produced zero friction going into the cork—and stayed put when we were popping it out.
Make Springtime Entertaining a Breeze
We gathered all the tools we use to make entertaining feel effortless.
This continuous-turn corkscrew was astonishingly easy to use, requiring no expertise and removing corks in an average of 12 seconds. Its 4.75-inch worm accommodates corks of any length, and its nonstick coating helped ensure that it pierced even brittle older corks almost as smoothly and neatly as our waiter’s corkscrew. It’s slim and lightweight—nearly as compact as our favorite waiter’s corkscrew—making it easy to handle and store.
These precut parchment sheets, which come in a large plastic zipper-lock bag, are the only ones in our lineup that are stored completely flat. They're also sized just right to slide easily into a standard rimmed baking sheet, although we did have to use two overlapping sheets when rolling jelly roll cakes into coils. Their superior convenience made them the runaway favorite. Don't let the purchase price distract you: The per-sheet cost falls squarely in the middle of our lineup.
Everything prepared in this sturdy, warp-resistant sheet cooked appropriately and evenly. Best of all, our new favorite is a few bucks cheaper than our old winner.
This cheese plane produced perfect, clean-edged, even slices of ideal thickness every time. With a comfortable handle, a relatively long blade, and one of the thinnest and most flexible heads in the testing, it was a pleasure to use.
With four removable freezable ice packs buffered by a 1/2-inch-thick zone of air, this wine cooler did a superb job of keeping wine cold, taking a whopping 7 hours to allow the wine’s temperature to rise 10 degrees. And it maintained the wine’s temperature within a single degree for an average of 5 hours. One minor caveat: The inserts must be completely frozen before they can be used, or the cooler won’t be as effective.
Our previous favorite still excelled with power; precision; and a compact, streamlined design that takes up less space than most food processors, despite having one of the largest capacities, all at a moderate price. Its smooth, simple bowl and blade design are easy to handle, monitor during use, and clean. Its unusual feed tube placement allows for increased bowl visibility. It comes with just three blades for chopping, shredding, and slicing that can all be stored inside the bowl, with no accessories box to deal with. However, since we last tested it, the chopping blade was redesigned and leaves slightly bigger gaps between it and the bottom and side of the bowl, so it couldn’t effectively incorporate egg yolks into single-batch mayonnaise. We didn’t discover any other adverse effects from these slightly bigger gaps, which were still narrower than those of lower-ranked models. It did chop mirepoix uniformly and was one of only two models to give us perfectly green-colored yogurt in our dye test. Although it lacks a mini bowl for very small jobs, a double batch of mayonnaise worked well.
Our old favorite wins again: Its smooth, medium-hard, reversible teak surface provided plenty of room to work, was a pleasure to cut on, and required the least maintenance. It was light enough to lift comfortably (especially since it had finger grips on the sides) but heavy enough to be stable for most tasks, though a few users noted that it wobbled occasionally. It picked up some knife scars but was otherwise highly durable, resisting cracking, warping, and staining, thanks to naturally oily resins that helped condition the board. And it's a stunner: Sleek, elegant, and richly colored, it was, as one tester noted, “less like a Toyota and more like a Corvette.” One caveat: Because teak contains microscopic bits of silica, it can wear down blades faster than other types of wood. But in our opinion, this fact doesn't detract from this board's stellar performance.
Made of teak, this bar board is naturally slightly oily, so it required less maintenance than the other wood or bamboo boards we tested, and it stained somewhat less extensively. It was big enough to accommodate all the foods we cut on it though still highly portable. And it’s reversible, with a juice groove on one side that helped contain messes when we cut a lemon into wedges. It was the heaviest bar board we tested, so it stayed put on the counter pretty well, though rubbery grips would have provided some extra security. Finally, it’s quite handsome, making a beautiful small platter for serving cheese or charcuterie.
This reversible plastic bar board was the largest we tested, allowing us to cut all manner of small foods with room to spare. It sat securely on the counter, thanks to its rubbery grips and moderate weight. And it was easy to clean in the dishwasher. A juice groove on one side of the board was great for containing small volumes of liquid. It’s not the prettiest board, but in a pinch, it could still be used to serve cheese or snacks.
This insulated stainless-steel tumbler stood out with its slim shape and smooth but grippy surface. But its appeal didn’t stop there. The tumbler’s airtight lid was so solid that even when knocked over and thrown in a backpack, nary a drop of liquid escaped—an impressive feat. The only downside to the lid was that the vacuum seal made it somewhat difficult to remove, but it was a small price to pay for keeping every precious sip of wine in the tumbler. Testers also liked the lid slider that covers the sipping port; it opened smoothly and evenly. When tasked with keeping wine chilled, the tumbler succeeded for an impressive 4 hours and 30 minutes.
With a hard plastic frame and lid enclosing a silicone ice cube tray, this model was easy to transport to the freezer without spilling and made excellent ice cubes that were clean and straight-edged. The frame and lid also helped reduce freezer and coffee odors; while the silicone tray did smell slightly after a week, the problem was less pronounced than in several other models. Relatively compact, it’ll fit in most freezers.
This clear ice maker made the prettiest ice cubes: sparkling, perfectly cube-shaped, and completely transparent. Its insulated plastic frame makes it easy to transport to the freezer and helps protect the silicone tray inside against freezer and coffee odors somewhat. But it’s pricey and it requires a large chunk of freezer space. Plus, it can be a bit tricky to pry the silicone ice tray out of its insulated frame; we often needed to chisel four “unclear” cubes off the bottom of the tray before we were able to get the clear ice out.
The two ice sphere molds in this set were a little finicky to fill, requiring us to pour water through a relatively small hole in the molds’ top hemispheres. But their hard plastic shells were compact and stackable, so they were easy to transport and fit into small niches in the freezer. While the silicone hemispheres that form the ice do pick up some freezer and coffee odor, they make for particularly easy ice removal: Just push on the silicone bottom and the sphere pops right out. As with the other sphere molds, you won’t get perfectly round ice—the spheres look a little like cute ringed planets with small bumps on top.
Our favorite set of plastic cups has everything we were looking for, including thin rims that make the cups very pleasant to drink from. The textured exterior allowed us to grip the cups securely. After these cups were used, washed repeatedly, and deliberately dropped onto concrete, they retained only minor nicks and dents. A bonus: This is the least expensive set (per cup) in our lineup.
Though their rims are slightly thicker than those on the cups of our winning set, these cups were still nice to drink from. They had the second-widest bases in our lineup, so each cup sat sturdily on all surfaces. Testers were able to securely hold the cups, thanks to the attractive water-like ripple pattern on the cups’ exteriors. When dropped repeatedly, these cups retained a similar amount of dings as the other cups in our lineup. Lastly, they are stackable for easy storage.