Welcome back to another Tools and Tricks, everyone!

Have you ever gotten the urge to make a drink–say, a Mint Julep or a Planters Punch–that required crushed ice, only to realize that you have no way to quickly procure crushed ice for yourself? Have you ever resorted to filling a ziplock bag with ice and using a hammer to smash it? Well, no more!

We here at The Woman At The Bar love a good crushed-ice drink, and we also tend to have some pent up aggression that we need a safe outlet for, so we are ALL about crushing ice! Thankfully, there is an easy and cheap way to do it, without pulling out your freezer bags and meat tenderizer. (We know you have crushed ice this way before, don’t try to lie about it.)

There are a lot of drinks in the mixology world that require crushed ice, and many more that are just better with it than with the traditional square or tablet-shaped varieties. Unfortunately, just using a heavy kitchen appliance to crush some of the ice from your fridge is not a good way to go about making your own, for many reasons, but most of all because it is important that the ice pieces you end up with are relatively uniform in size so they don’t melt too quickly, and using a hammer is not going to give you uniform results…

The solution is one of these babies:

Now, there are times in life, and in your kitchen, where fancy-pants expensive devices are useful. This is not one of those times. This thing is just about as basic as it can get. We present to you, the Victorio Hand Crank Portable Ice Crusher.

This is super easy to use, and will only run you about $25! It works like this:

You open the lid at the top of the device,

Pour in normal ice from your fridge to fill the well,

Close the lid, and use your very own elbow grease to turn the crank on the side,

And in a flash, you’ve got yourself beautifully crushed ice!

As we said, it is about as easy as it gets.

The device itself is also incredibly easy to clean, and makes the process of prepping your ice WAY faster than if you use the old ziplock/hammer method.

We highly, HIGHLY recommend picking one up. You won’t regret it!

You can purchase your very own here.

Happy Tuesday, and Happy Crushing!