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Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
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Credit:
Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
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This battery-operated device easily opens jar lids with the push of a button. Read More
This adjustable stainless steel clamp with a corkscrew handle is a great choice if you're looking for a jar opener without batteries. Read More
It doesn’t get any more basic than this: a set of two textured rubber pads, one square and one round, along with a thicker ribbed cone. Read More
This is a two-part device: a base pad that helps stabilize your jar and a tool with short easy-to-grip handle attached to an indented rigid paddle lined on one side with metal teeth. Read More
A manual, clamp-based circular head envelopes the lid and the long handle helps give you more leverage to open jars. Read More
If you’ve ever found yourself wrestling with a jar of pickles or pasta sauce as the dinner hour approaches, you’ve probably scanned your kitchen for anything that might open that stubborn jar lid. While help from a friend, some rubber kitchen gloves, or a dish towel will sometimes do the trick, it turns out there are better options that will let you break a jar seal without hurting your hands and wrists.
In multiple rounds of lab and home kitchen tests, we found that a nifty automatic device called the Robo Twist (available at Amazon) is the best jar-opening tool on the market, able to pop open everything from big sauce jars to small jam jars with minimal effort. Even people with arthritis or weak hands should find it easy to use. If you want something more compact and have a bit more grip strength, we can also recommend the manual Kichwit Jar Opener (available at Amazon for $8.99).
Base pad keeps jar steady
Easy to grip handle
Can be hard to engage large lids
Metal teeth strip some lids
We used a force meter on some of the openers to help us see how much strength was needed to break the jar seal.
I’m Kim Painter, a veteran health and lifestyle journalist who happens to possess the most important quality for testing these gadgets: aging hands. While I don’t have arthritis and I’m reasonably fit, I am old enough to notice the very real decline in grip strength most of us eventually experience.
First, our lab tester used each jar opener to open (or try to open) tomato sauce jars, salsa jars, jam jars, pickle jars, and bottles of lemonade, all of which were factory sealed. She noted how hard she worked and whether her hands or arms hurt afterward. She also used a force meter in an attempt to determine which of the jar openers with handles required the most effort to operate.
Next, our home kitchen tester tried each opener on a tomato sauce jar—eliminating any that failed that basic test—and then tried the top four contenders on another jar of sauce, a jar of salsa, and a jam jar. She noted how hard she worked and whether her hands and arms hurt afterward. We also assigned points for ease of storage, apparent quality, and durability.
Not everyone needs a jar opener, but grip strength weakens as people age, so the same jars can become more difficult to open over time.
If you’ve never struggled to open a jar, you are either very young and strong or you don’t eat at home very often. The rest of us have done battle with tightly sealed foodstuffs often enough to develop a few coping strategies. Even able-bodied people can struggle.
Frain says his own best jar-opening method is tilting the canister 45 degrees and tapping its base with his palm to create some outward pressure. Or, he says, you can run a metal lid under warm water to slightly expand it. Other folks find opening stuck jars a less troublesome task when leveraging rubber gloves, knubby towels or whacking the thing with a knife.
Jar seals can keep people safe by keeping bacteria out of our food, but the side effect can make sealed jars difficult to open.
You may be wondering, as we were, why it can be such a struggle to get these jars open in the first place. For an answer to that question, we checked in with Thomas Frain, senior director of culinary research at Conagra Brands, which owns Vlasic, Frontera, and other popular food brands.
He told us the unfortunate struggle is a matter of food safety: Certain foods, including tomato sauces and pickles, must be heat-processed and vacuum-sealed to keep air and microorganisms out. Those tend to be the hardest jars to open because turning the lid requires releasing the pressure holding that seal in place.
As anyone who has tried to can food at home knows, while that seal makes it difficult to twist off the top of the jar, it ensures that the food inside will last far longer than other storage methods—and still be tasty when you're ready to enjoy it.
And what about food that's direct from a factory versus food bought in a store? After our conversation, representatives from Conagra offered to send our lab a case of pickles and a case of salsa direct from their factories for our tests.
We took them up on the offer and added additional jars to our testing that we bought at a local Whole Foods. We noticed no difference in seal strength between jars that were sent to us directly from the factory versus jars we picked up at the neighborhood store. All jars were equally tough to twist open.
Rubber gloves can help with creating a firmer grip to open jars, but our tester found that jar opening devices worked much better at breaking tough seals.
Folks with arthritis, hand tremors, or an injury might be tempted to give up on jarred foods altogether. But buying the right jar opener can help. The biggest question is whether you’d do best with an automatic, battery-powered, or smaller hand-powered option. An automatic jar opener is easiest, assuming it works.
Anything that lacks batteries is going to require some strength and dexterity, to turn the lid and hold the jar in place. We found some required more effort than we liked, and others were just a bad fit for certain lids. That said, every jar opener we tested performed better than the pair of rubber gloves our home tester swore by in the past.
Kim Painter
Contributor
Kim Painter is a veteran health and lifestyle journalist who spent three decades as a staff reporter and contributing columnist at USA Today.
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