I’m looking for a kitchen gizmo that may or may not exist… Picture the six or eight blades of an apple corer/slicer on a stick like a restaurant sized potato masher. But to be durable, the fins need to be taller than the blades of the apple tool, and probably don’t need to be very sharp. The overall length probably needs to be 18” or more.
What I’m trying to do is cut and mash strawberries and blueberries in a cambro. How we do it currently is to “slice” through the berries to the sides of the container, which is a bit dangerous and hard on the cambros as they get nicked up. The berries are often being worked while frozen, so the tool needs to be decently sturdy. I’ve had no luck at webstaurantstore, and the local Smart and Final had no clue.
If you are storing the berries frozen, can you just smash them up in the bag before you add them to the cambro (or at some point while they are still frozen)?
Pampered Chef makes a tool called a Mix 'N Chop that will do what you want very well. It’s tough enough to chop cooked chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces. I use mine for that, as well as to smoosh berries into a muddle or break hamburger into pieces while it cooks in the pan.
Hope it suits.
Ninja’d by Alpha Twit – hadn’t clicked on his/her link before posting! I love mine.
That mix ‘n chop thing looks almost perfect. Just wish the handle was a bit longer.
What I’m up to is making mashed berries to make trifles at a pop-up location where we don’t have electricity to spare for any new appliance.
The cambro is for the efficiency of mixing and storing the fruit mix. We have dozens of them and no mixing bowls at all other than stand mixer bowls. And no, we can’t use the mixers. They’re already in nearly constant use.
I can tell you exactly what my grandmother used, what my mother used, and what I use. Take an empty standard metal can. Use a can opener (handheld works best) and cut the rim off. Use a church key (sharp end) to put a hole in the other end. Voila! You have a semi-flexible tool that will cut strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, etc., quite efficiently in a glass bowl.
Oh, we tried potato mashers. Things that may work OK with a pint of berries in a bowl don’t necessarily scale up when working with about ten pounds of berries in a two-gallon cambro.
I’ve ordered the longest-handled version of a mix-n-chop I could find, and will keep my fingers crossed for success.
I was thinking that if the berries are all frozen, you might be able to toss them (still frozen) in a food processor for a few pulses and get a nice mix of solid chunks and smaller pieces. This could be done in a prep location, with the berries put back in the freezer until pop-up time.
You might want to then mash some of them after defrosting, but that would be a plain potato masher task since the chopping already happened.
How about a longer-handled pastry cutter, like this?
A mezzaluna might be close but only one blade (or occasionally 2). A hand-held pizza roller cutter seems close - I could swear I once saw something like that which had multiple blades, but my google-fu is failing me. And it doesn’t have a long handle.
Oooh - thisis close to what I was thinking of. Multiple blades, long-ish handle. It’s plastic though, so I dunno how durable it would be.
Just a note for those, like me, who don’t know what a “Cambro” is, it is a brand name for large clear plastic commercial food storage containers. Sometimes you see them on America’s Test Kitchen, in fact I think Cambro is the brand they recommend.
I guess the name has become as ubiquitous for these sizes of container as Tupperware used to be for smaller ones.
I know the things you are picturing, and they are hard to find nowadays: A metal-finned radial masher with a slightly sharpened bottom. But I’d suggest that at your volume what you really should be using is a sausage grinder with a super-coarse setting. The hand-crank ones usually have this. You’ll get through it all with a lot less wear and tear on the staff, and if I’m understanding you correctly, exactly the texture you are looking for. If you have one for your mixer try just using it on the slowest setting without any extrusion screen.
