This past summer I fell in love with a kitchen gadget that has been relatively slow to catch on in the U.S. — the mandoline.
I’ve had several of these kicking around my kitchen for a while now, but I never quite saw the need for them. For those not in the know, a mandoline is shaped like a plank with a very thin, very sharp blade at the far end. To use it, you slide a firm vegetable back and forth along the plank. Each time you slide over the blade, it shaves a slice off the vegetable.
Many models are adjustable, allowing you to quickly and easily create slices ranging from 1/4 inch to paper thin. Which is nice, but so what? I have good knives and a good food processor, both of which slice nicely.
Except the mandoline isn’t simply a manual food processor, and it is so much more precise than a knife. Food processors usually are too robust to produce ultrathin slices. And knives — at least in most home cooks’ hands (including my own) — simply can’t produce consistent results.