I have a mandolin, that I use a lot. I, also, have a good set of knives. I use these a lot too.
Why does the mandolin seem to stay sharp while I have to sharpen the knives every so often.
Never comes in contact with cutting boards, countertops, other utensils, etc.
Also, it’s unlikely you’re chopping up things with bones.
I find I need to tune my mandolin every time I take it out.
My guess too, plus most of the things you’d cut with a mandolin are pretty soft.
Largely this. Your mandolin blade is also very thin and made of a very strong but ductile stainless steel alloy. The thinness gives it a very sharp edge that even after wear will stay thinner. You can’t make a knife that thin because it would bend in use, but your mandolin blade is rigidly supported at both ends so it won’t flex in use.
These are all good points that I never thought of and they make a lot of sense.
Thank you one and all.
Huh? I had to do some googlizing to figure out what everybody’s talking about here. It appears that the more correct spelling is mandoline as opposed to the mandolin which, suitably employed, could be used as an hardboiled-egg-slicer I suppose.
That’s a stupid oddity of some non-American version of English. The device is named after the instrument we spell as mandolin, so there’s no reason not to use the same name for the slicer. Really, you should not cooperate such a concept of ‘more correct spelling’ that has it otherwise.
There’s an excellent reason, surely, which is to avoid the confusion that Senegoid suffered?
As for this being a non-American usage, if mandoline is good enough for Martha Stewart (and it is), what true American can deny its authentic Americanity?
Mandoline in the sense of a vegetable slicer is a recent (post-WWII) import from French, and American English I think has a greater tendency to preserve the Frenchness of French imports than does BrE. So, e.g., Americans eat filets, and use a French pronunciation, while the the Brits eat fillets, and pronounce them to rhyme with “millet”.
So I would have thought that retaining the final -e in mandoline is (a) sensible, and (b) not at all foreign to the conventions of AmE.
Thank you Senegoid! I was lost also.
It’s all in the steel. To understand it better have a look here.
Well, suffer I did, and massively so. The first several posts here caused me such a severe overload of parsing errors that several cognitive circuits melted down and the whole system crashed. Even as I type this post, I am still downloading and reinstalling backups from the cloud, and I will probably have no memory whatsoever of any posts I may have made here in the last half-hour or so.
I have never seen or heard of the device being discussed in this thread. However, I wonder: Is this a very specific device, or is “mandolin(e)” a somewhat generic word for any manner of fancy vegetable slicer, of the sort I see being sold by genuine Swedish chefs at county fairs? Those come in a variety of designs, not sold in stores! and the one that I once bought didn’t work very well at all.
Well, I googled… “If a mandolin is sharp, turning the tuning pegs clockwise will loosen the strings and lower the pitch. If flat, turning the tuning pegs anti-clockwise will tighten the strings and raise the pitch. Care must be taken in that the strings on the mandolin are paired, so both strings must be tuned in tandem.”
They forgot to mention that doing any of the above in public will label you as a Mumford-wannabe. Especially in that flannel shirt with your skinny jeans rolled up to show your hand-oiled work boots.
A mandoline looks like this. Does that look remotely like what you bought from the Swedish chef?
No, not the one I bought, but I’ve seen ones more-or-less like the one you pictured also being sold by County Fair Swedish Chefs. Does that kind work well? The one I bought was very different, and worked horribly badly, so when I later saw one something like the one you pictured, I passed it up.
The one I didn’t buy was hand-held (IIRC), rather than propped up with legs like the one pictured. I think you could put various arrangements of one or two blades in it to create very elaborately fancy sliced stuff. ISTM he did one demo of making fancy scalloped potato slices that looked something like this picture. No, not the potato stuff in that picture. It sliced potatoes to look something like that tablecloth that the dish is sitting on!
Okay, here’s a picture of the fancy potato slicing I saw done by a County Fair Swedish Chef using a hand-held mandoline-like device, that I suppose probably really was some kind of mandoline.
Picture – with recipe – taken from this blogspot, with directions that do in fact say to use a mandoline (note spelling).
So, my question still: Does this device actually work well, and easily, for slicing potatoes? (ETA: If yes, I want one!)
I can’t really say, since I don’t possess a mandoline. My preference in food is, um, rustic, so I don’t have much call for potato topiary. You can boil them or bake them or roast them. if they’re too big you can chop them up with a knife. And that’s as far as it goes.
My guess, however, is that for those who have a need of such things, mandolines vary in effectiveness and durability, and and is the case with a lot of kitchen equipment you get what you pay for.
We have one from Pampered Chef and it works well. The blade on it is dangerously sharp and of good steel, probably Elmax steel.
This thought is also being discussed in a nearby thread about can-openers. It was news to me that some can openers, including mine, could be used to cut the top of a can off from the side, just below the rim.
With respect to the above, and to the OP’s original question: The blades (as shown in the picture that UDS linked a few posts up) look very elaborate, and I would think they’d be extremely difficult to sharpen if they didn’t stay sharp on their own.
ETA: Where are these things sold, besides at County Fairs? I don’t recall ever seeing one in the kitchenware aisle at the market. Are they found at more specialized stores like Bed Bath & Beyond (which I think carries kitchenware too)? Or other higher-end cutlery stores? (More ETA: Hey, at least now that I know what it’s called, I could ask someone.)