As you might have already guessed from the recipes I've posted so far, my husband and I go through a lot of garlic. Neither of us are fans of mincing garlic with a knife. The minced garlic in a jar isn't that fresh though I confess to using it before I was married just because it was easy. And grating it using a Microplane gets old fast when you have half a dozen cloves to get through. My husband, Artis, had picked up the habit of using a garlic press so when he moved here, we did some research and decided to buy a new one here that hopefully didn't have the problems of his old one (separate cleaning thingie, small chamber). Unfortunately, the one we first went with broke at the hinge after only six months. We quickly found out how difficult it is to pick a new press that wouldn't suffer from the same problem and remained affordable. ($40 for a press seems steep to me.) Eventually, we found and settled on the Royal VKB Garlic Crusher, designed by Ineke Hans. Even comes in a nice box, no clamshell packaging! There are no moving parts -- it's just a solid fluted 7.5" stainless steel rod. It takes a little more time to crush garlic cloves but it's easy to clean and fun to use. It's also efficient, leaving nothing uncrushed, provided you don't miss something. And the price is on par with the mid-range presses -- we paid about $20 on Amazon. We received it a few days ago and immediately tested it out. The first reaction? "It really IS fun to use!"