Different chefs submit their favorite cooking tools to us every week, and every week there’s something new — bench scrapers, rubber cutting boards, $10 knives and more. Because chefs are choosy about their kitchen EDC, items are rarely recommended by more than one chef. The Benriner mandoline is the exception.
Recommended by no less than five chefs on our site and dozens more elsewhere, Benriner’s affordable slicing tools are, almost ubiquitously so, the most-suggested mandolines you can buy. What makes them great? Read on.
Uniformity reigns supreme.
Perhaps the most common failure of home cooks as it relates to knife skills is consistent cuts. Onions, carrots, celery, pepper, garlic, ginger and every other mise en place produce need to be prepared evenly so they cook evenly. Mandolines, which are operated by sliding the produce back and forth across a fixed blade, are the only thing better than a well-trained chef at prepping uniform veggies. Benriner’s allows for slices as thin as .2mm and thick as 8mm.
Gotta go fast.
Beyond slices that are all the same size, mandolines speed up prep for all by the quickest home cooks. And because Benriner’s option comes with a handguard that actually works (most don’t grip the vegetable your slicing well enough to use), you’re able to buzzsaw produce at an alarming rate.
It’s good for experts and beginners.
Sometimes professional chefs love gear that isn’t suitable for home kitchens — take this $2,399 vacuum sealer as an example. Benriner’s mandoline pulls both off well. It’s fast and easy to take apart and clean, plus, because it lays flat, it fits in a drawer or cabinet particularly well. The actually functional handguard is also a big plus. If you don’t know what to use it for, consider it for literally everything: potato chips, mirepoix foundation, salad veggies and so on.
The price isn’t bad at all.
The best mandoline money can buy is $40 on Amazon and goes on sale for around $30 fairly often. Larger sizes, which are useful for handling russet potatoes, eggplant and other big produce, run about $60 or so.
