Saw teeth are hardened, and of course they are serrated edge, so they’ll continue to cut well even if the points aren’t particularly sharp. But they cut raggedly as well. Serrated knives will be the same. Super-stainless steel serrated knives last years without sharpening but don’t slice cleanly and have to work by sliding the edge after the teeth begin to dull.
Hey guys, don’t get a mandolin that doesn’t have a food holder to protect your fingers. Do the same with a kitchen slicer also.
Makes wicked French fries. 
Depends on who plays it.
Mandolines are dangerous as hell in this regard. I’ve almost done the same thing several times. The problem is you go through the vegetables so quickly and effortlessly that you’re down into the danger zone before you realize it. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that because so much of the vegetable remains by the time your fingers get to blade level you don’t realize you’re fingers are approaching the blade. I’m always super careful when using a mandoline and always make sure to employ the vegetable gripper once the item being cut is small enough for the gripper to hold it in place.
ETA: I much prefer the mandoline spelling to differentiate the cutting tool from the musical instrument. I see nothing at all wrong with a spelling that serves to make that distinction.
Yikes! I just realized that cartoon is from fifty-five years ago!
TriPolar, we’re showing our age here.
That black plastic piece in the picture that UDS posted (here it is again) – Is that a vegetable gripper? If so, it isn’t really obvious.
Way to get some protein in your diet.
The harp is more a big-ass hard-boiled ostrich egg slicer. Look at that mandoline pic again. It looks more like a miniature guillotine. And according to several of the above posts, it functions so, too.
It has metal prongs on the underside to spear the food and hold it in place.
I almost took the tip of my right thumb off with one. The doc at the emergency room glued it back on with some type of super glue. I did lose the piece of the nail that was sliced off though.
[QUOTE=Senegoid]
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!)
[/QUOTE]
Very easy if you have wave slicer, one came with my mandolin. Set it to the thinner slicing mode and rotate the spud 90 degrees with each pass. Waffle fries are very popular with my grandkids when they eat at my place. I have had mine about 20 years, bought it at the Puyallup fair, and it still works great.
Reported.
