Best ice ball presses

There is no cutting and no crushing. An ice press is two halves of a machined aluminum block with a hemispherical cavity in each. Aluminum conducts heat extremely well and the press is at room temperature, so where the metal touches the ice it melts it - fast, and only where it touches.

Put a rough block in the cavity and let the top half down onto it, and gravity plus the weight of the metal does the rest. The ice melts away everywhere the cavity contacts it, and the block descends into the void until it matches the cavity exactly. What falls out is a sphere, and the meltwater runs off through the channel in the base.

Two useful consequences follow. The first is speed: this is a thirty-to-sixty second operation, not an overnight one. The second is density: because you started with an already-frozen block rather than with water, a pressed sphere has no fresh freeze structure at all - it is simply the densest part of the block you fed it.

This is the specification that gets skipped, and it is the one that decides whether the tool is useful in your kitchen. A press reshapes ice. You still have to produce a block large enough and clear enough to be worth reshaping.

In practice that means one of three sources: an insulated clear-ice mold, a countertop machine that makes large clear pieces, or a large block you freeze deliberately in a lidded container and cut down. All three are a separate purchase or a separate routine. A bag of supermarket ice will not feed a press - the cubes are far too small, and a cloudy block presses into a cloudy sphere.

The single most common disappointment with a press is buying it before solving the block problem. Solve the block first - best clear ice molds - and the press becomes the fast finishing step it is meant to be.

There is very little to go wrong in a press, which makes the selection criteria unusually short and unusually concrete. We weighted:

• Material and mass. Aluminum, and enough of it. Thermal conductivity plus weight is the entire mechanism, and a light press is a slow press.
• Finish. Anodizing matters for corrosion resistance on a tool that is repeatedly wet.
• Cavity size. A sphere that fits your actual glassware. Anything much over 2.5 inches wants a wide glass.
• Drainage. A base channel that gets the meltwater away rather than pooling it under the press.
• No moving parts. Hinges, springs and levers are things that can fail in a tool that does not need them.

Read that table as a question about hosting rather than about ice. A mold is for a person who knows on Friday that they will want a drink on Saturday. A press is for a person who wants to hand someone a sphere while they are still deciding what to drink.

There is also a practical middle route that is worth more attention than it gets: use a cube mold as your daily driver, keep the press for company. Cubes are the more useful everyday shape anyway, and the press turns any of them into the party trick when you want it.

1. Temper the block for a minute or two. Ice straight from a cold freezer is brittle and can fracture under the press. A short rest at room temperature takes the edge off.
2. Start with a block bigger than the cavity, not smaller. Undersized ice produces a flat-sided sphere, because the cavity never fully closed around it.
3. Let gravity do it. Pushing down hard is how you crack a block. The press is heavy for a reason.
4. Let the meltwater run. Press over a sink or a channeled base, not on a wooden counter.
5. Keep the press dry between uses. Anodized aluminum tolerates water well; standing water plus salt from a cloth is how you mark it.

And glassware: a 60mm sphere needs a mouth wide enough to accept it and a bowl deep enough that the pour covers it. If your rocks glasses are 9oz, check them before you commit - best rocks glasses covers the sizes that actually work with large ice.