S’s lean, mean, slicing machine

A few months ago, S came home with a large, gray and rather suspicious looking case. As an avid-movie junkie with an over-active imagination, the first thing that popped into my head was, “Oh my Lord, my wife’s bought herself a gun.” Seriously, I half expected her to pop open her little suitcase, pull out a state of the art bolt-action rifle with a high-powered scope and tell me she’d given up food writing for life as an assasin. While the case didn’t contain a gun, it did carry one pretty sexy but dangerous looking device. S calls it her lean, mean, slicing machine.

The de Buyer La Mandoline V Professionnelle is a professional quality slicer that makes usually time-consuming kitchen chores a real breeze. The stand that it comes with allows for the mandoline to be placed at a 45 degree angle, which makes it much more comfortable to use. And it can be adjusted for left-handed use, essential for S since she’s a lefty. It’s perfect when preparing dishes that call for ingredients to be julienned or sliced thinly. The mandoline comes with 2 blades and 4 different julienne inserts. You can create everything from waffle-cut potato chips to the thinnest of juliennes. S was close to swooning over the fact that with her new swanky machine she could achieve, in mere minutes, the thin, even slices of potato for Pommes Anna that used to take her ages to slice by hand. The sturdy attachment that protects your hand as you use it slides easily and keeps your fingers from being chopped up by the device’s intimidatingly sharp blades.

Truth be told, I still haven’t given the mandoline a test-drive. For a couple reasons. Firstly, I haven’t read the instructions yet and I’m not about to start playing with anything with such scary blades without really knowing how it works. Secondly, it’s S’s lean, mean, slicing machine. Not mine. And so long as she’s happy to keep using it to make delicious foods for yours truly, then who am I to rock the boat?

The de Buyer, of course, isn’t the only professional mandoline on the market. Our dear friend and neighbor J of Kuidaore uses a Bron Classic Mandoline. S borrowed it once but didn’t end up using it. After setting it up and staring at it for a while, she decided that the device just plain scared her too much. The de Buyer, on the hand, looks and feels reassuringly safe. And given that my darling wife, while an awesome cook, is at times a klutz in the kitchen, I feel much better knowing she’s using something that she feels confident using. If you cook as much as we do, this is a device you might want to consider investing in. It really does save you tons of time and effort. Plus it’s pretty darned cool looking.