The Chef's Secret Weapon

Dangerous to use but exquisitely efficient, the mandoline will ensure that you aren’t losing precious time slicing those vegetables—just make sure you don’t lose a finger. Chad Ward presents five facts about the culinary tool.

1. These things are dangerous.

Just as working chefs invariably have a mandoline—the French spelling is used to distinguish the culinary tool from the musical instrument—in their kits, they also have scars on their knuckles, and every one has a mandoline horror story. To use a mandoline, in fact, you must slide your hand toward a sharp blade. The best ones have a workable hand guard that holds the food in place while keeping your precious digits from ending up in the Caesar salad. Some even have the hand guard on rails so you can’t screw up. Treat your mandoline with the same respect you treat your chef’s knives—possibly even more. After all, you rarely swipe your hand directly into the blade of your chef’s knife.

Coleslaw for a crowd and gratin by the cubic yard are not a problem if you have a mandoline in your arsenal.

2. The hand guard is really important.

Use the hand guard! If it isn’t big enough to hold the product or doesn’t grip securely, invest in a cut-proof glove or use a folded side towel to grab the veggie in question before slicing and dicing. Some chefs freehand it, but see the previous note about scars. They all have them. Watch your fingers. Don’t try to get every last slice out of the vegetable. Stop while you still have something to hold on to. Save the leftovers for the stockpot instead of trying to get the last chip from a potato or shred from a carrot—that’s a recipe for pain. If you must eke out the last bit of vegetable, take a tip from the pros: Don’t grip the veg with your fingers. Lay your palm flat on the food with your fingers arced upward to ensure that everything is well above the blade when you slide that last bit through.

3. You don’t need a mandoline (but they’re damned handy).

A mandoline is part of every working chef’s toolbox. But do you need one in your kitchen? Not really. If you have even modest knife skills and don’t do a lot of entertaining, you can do anything and everything you ever need to do in a kitchen with just a chef’s knife and paring knife. That gets tedious, however, if you need to turn out large quantities of fine julienne or produce a boatload of precisely sliced vegetables in a hurry. That’s where a mandoline comes in handy. You can produce pounds of matchstick carrots and heaps of uniform potatoes or apple slices in a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand. Coleslaw for a crowd and gratin by the cubic yard are not a problem if you have a mandoline in your kitchen arsenal.

An example from my own life: Not long ago, our CSA box yielded more sweet potatoes than any family could reasonably eat. While a pot of oil heated on the stovetop, I adjusted the blade on a heavy-duty mandoline, taking a couple of test swipes with a sweet potato to get the slice just slightly thicker than whisper thin—a feat not readily repeatable with a chef’s knife, no matter how much practice you’ve had. While the first double handful of sweet potato chips were crisping up in the oil, I ran a couple of more sweet potatoes across the blade of the mandoline, slicing the next batch as each pot cooked to golden brown. The net result was about four pounds of sweet potato chips in barely more than the time it took to heat the oil. I’ve got decent knife skills, but there is no way I could have done that as quickly or uniformly as I could with a mandoline. Whether you are frying potato chips or julienning vegetables for a side dish, consistently cut vegetables cook more evenly, ensuring that everything reaches doneness at the same time. And, yes, for the skeptics, mandolines cut more precisely and uniformly than even the most expensive food processor.