Vaya Con Mandoline!

Rating: B
After being given the opportunity to pick a product from the wonderful people over at CSN Stores to review I began to browse around to see what I would like and something that I think would also be great to own. It took a while to find what I thought would be suitable for the price range that I was given and something that I thought would be worth reviewing considering their myriad of items to choose from. I finally ended up settling on the OXO Hand Held Mandoline. When I first saw the word “mandoline”, I thought that it meant the musical instrument so I was very confused, but now I feel like my vocabulary has expanded, so thanks for that. Anyway, I saw this and thought that it would be a good item to write a review on, the only problem was that it was a bit pricey. I was given a $20 gift certificate to use in order to pick an item and when I got the total with shipping and handling it came out to be slightly over, but I thought about the price again and said to myself that if it costs this much then it has to be a pretty good product, so I took the dive.

I have to tell you that I’m glad that I did. When I received the product in the mail, I opened it and gave it a good looking over. I don’t know exactly what all of the materials that the mandoline is made of, but from what I could tell, I saw a plastic body, a rubber grip, and a stainless steel blade. Now, I’m not an expert when it comes to kitchen utensils but I thought that it was pretty cool that it had three different settings with the thinnest setting serving as a safety from the blade when cleaning the product, which ended up being pretty straight forward. I was afraid that there would be bits and pieces of the potatoes that my fiancé sliced to make homemade potato chips stuck in the corners, but that was not the case at all. The slicer is made to where the handle and body come together to form an arc, this also provided a great way to test durability. I pressed down fairly hard to see if it could withstand a great amount of pressure and it held up very well. The slicer also has a lip so that it is easy to hold over a bowl and let the slices of whatever you want fall right in. I found this concept to have good intentions but extremely cumbrous making it difficult to accomplish.

I also found that the stainless steel blade works extremely well and allows most food items to slide right through, with the exception of a block of cheese that was, for some reason, impossible to slice. The mandoline also comes with a separate grip that makes it safe and easy to slice objects when almost all of it is gone. All in all, I think this is a great product that I will continue to use well into the future for whatever I see fit, except cheese. I plan on trying to slice a block of cheese again because I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have possibly been doing it wrong, give me a break, I’m a man. I would recommend this product to others but only if they are willing to shell out a little cash because I do think that it is a bit on the expensive side.