The 2 Best Vegetable Peelers of 2023

We’ve added long-term testing notes for both the Kuhn Rikon and OXO Good Grips peelers.

Life is too short to struggle with peeling potatoes or carrots. It's worth the minimal investment to get a great vegetable peeler.

After more than a decade using the Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss Peeler and the OXO Good Grips Pro Swivel Peeler, we’ve found that both tackle a range of vegetables and fruits far better than other models. We recommend getting the one that suits your peeling style better.

Preferred by pros, this super-lightweight peeler's extra-sharp blade and bargain price are worth tolerating the cheap plastic casing and minor rust buildup.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $8.

In our tests, the Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss Peeler excelled at peeling just about every type of fruit or vegetable we tried it with, including eggplant and carrots.

It's universally loved among the food-industry experts we spoke with, who praised its sharpness and consistency. They also liked its durability—some of them had been using the same Kuhn Rikon peeler for years, with no plans to replace it anytime soon.

Choose the Kuhn Rikon peeler if you want a wider range of motion, as it generally lets you rotate your hand 180 degrees around what you’re peeling. It also makes a deeper cut than our pick from OXO, so it's better for thick-skinned vegetables.

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This heavy and durable straight swivel model peels efficiently and tackles hard-to-get crevices with its handy potato eyer.

The OXO Good Grips Pro Swivel Peeler won us over with its build quality and comfortable silicone handle. It did an exceptional job of peeling lemons and parmesan without clogging in our tests, and it has stayed sharp after years of use. In addition, its blade is less prone to rusting than that of the Kuhn Rikon peeler.

Choose this OXO peeler if you want a more ergonomic grip and are comfortable using a peeler as you would a traditional paring knife, in which your wrist just moves back or forth. It's also better than the Kuhn Rikon peeler for delicate tasks like peeling just the outermost rind from a piece of citrus.

Preferred by pros, this super-lightweight peeler's extra-sharp blade and bargain price are worth tolerating the cheap plastic casing and minor rust buildup.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $8.

This heavy and durable straight swivel model peels efficiently and tackles hard-to-get crevices with its handy potato eyer.

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:

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.

Preferred by pros, this super-lightweight peeler's extra-sharp blade and bargain price are worth tolerating the cheap plastic casing and minor rust buildup.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $8.

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."

This heavy and durable straight swivel model peels efficiently and tackles hard-to-get crevices with its handy potato eyer.

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.

Fruit/Vegetable Peelers (subscription required), America's Test Kitchen

Christine Cyr Clisset

Christine Cyr Clisset is a deputy editor overseeing home coverage for Wirecutter. She previously edited cookbooks and craft books for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and she started reviewing kitchen gear back in 2013. She sews many of her own clothes, which has made her obsessive about high-quality fabrics—whether in a dress or bedsheets.

Michael Sullivan

Michael Sullivan has been a staff writer on the kitchen team at Wirecutter since 2016. Previously, he was an editor at the International Culinary Center in New York. He has worked in various facets of the food and restaurant industry for over a decade.

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