The Best Mandolines

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This no-frills Super Benriner model is a cult favorite among restaurant cooks and home cooks alike, and for good reason: Its razor-sharp blades can handle even the toughest produce, and it can be set in a seemingly infinite range of thicknesses, effortlessly churning out paper-thin or chunky slices and julienne. (There are no fixed thickness settings, but most testers saw this as a positive trait, since it allowed them to customize the thickness so broadly.) It’s big enough to handle larger produce but still relatively compact for easy storage. And though it has only a simple rubber bumper, it rarely budges, thanks again to its sharp blade, which requires so little effort to slice food that the mandoline never fights back. Its simple plank shape allows you to use it vertically or to hook it over a bowl. Just don’t expect much from its hand guard, which is pretty much useless.

This mandoline was the most user-friendly of the bunch; it’s a cinch to set up and use, thanks to a clearly marked, accurate dial that allows you to adjust slice thickness in both 1/16-inch and 1-millimeter increments. Rubber-coated kickstands and a relatively heavy weight keep this mandoline superstable on the counter. And its innovative spring-loaded food pusher did a great job of protecting our hands and advancing all foods through the slicer, though our arms got tired from maintaining pressure on the pusher during long jobs. While its blades are not quite as sharp as some, it was capable of making nice, even slices in a wide range of thicknesses on all but the most fibrous produce; it can also make crinkle and waffle cuts and two widths of julienne (though you can’t vary the julienne’s thickness). It’s not cheap, and it’s a bit bulky to store, but it’s otherwise a fantastic option.

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The “original” Benriner is a slightly smaller version of our top choice, the Super Benriner, making it a great compact option for home cooks. It sports the same ultrasharp blade as our favorite, so it slices and juliennes even the toughest, densest produce effortlessly. And it allows you to cut in a wide variety of thicknesses, though there are no marked settings and its range runs thinner than our favorite, making it more ideal for paper-thin slices than for chunkier slabs. A rubber strip across the bottom of the unit helps stabilize it during use. A few things to note Like our favorite, it lacks a functional hand guard—you’ll want to wear a cut-resistant glove during use. And its platform is only about 2.5 inches wide, so you won’t be able to cut larger produce such as eggplant with it.

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This paddle-style mandoline was supersimple and supereasy to use; a dowel on the back of the platform allows you to adjust the thickness, though the settings themselves are abstractly numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4, with no correspondence to millimeter or inch measurements. Its ceramic blade was reasonably sharp, making nice, even slices with all but the toughest produce. Lightweight and lacking any kind of a backstop, it slides around a bit on the counter if you use it standing up, though we also used it over a bowl with success. Because it’s so small, it can’t handle larger produce, but it’s exceptionally easy to store. Our two quibbles? Its hand guard is useless, and it’s not very versatile: It’s not able to slice foods thickly, so you can’t rely on this tool for potato gratin or eggplant parm, and it has no julienne blades. But if you just want an inexpensive tool that makes beautiful paper-thin vegetable slices for salad, this is a great option.

Pricey but very solidly built, this nearly all-metal mandoline impressed us with its ability to make perfectly even slices and julienne with every type of produce we threw at it. It was relatively easy to set the thickness and swap out blades as needed. We also liked its spring-loaded hand guard/food pusher, which kept our hands away from the blades and efficiently advanced the food so that it all got cut with very little waste, although we had to take breaks to keep our arms from tiring as we kept pressure on the pusher during bigger jobs. Just a few small issues: Its main slicing blade has microserrations that leave visible lines on slices, marring their appearance, and while it does a good job of slicing foods thickly, it can’t slice foods paper-thin.

We were surprised by how much we liked this unusual mandoline, which was designed as a sort of pump-action guillotine. You insert food into a hopper; with one hand, you use a block to advance the food, and with the other, you push down a spring-loaded blade, slicing or julienning the food. It was fairly easy to set up and use; better still, it was indeed as safe as advertised. No hands ever come even close to the blades themselves; as a result, you can slice foods very quickly and with no waste. Suction cups on the base mostly kept the whole thing stable, and the blades were fairly sharp, handling most of the produce with ease. What we didn’t like: The hopper is tiny, so you have to cut food into small pieces to fit it inside—no eggplant planks or long carrot strands. And it doesn’t cut as thinly, consistently, or evenly as we’d prefer.

With a glass platform, this mandoline sure was a looker, though to be fair, we couldn’t really see through it while we were using it, as its large hand guard obstructed our view. Rubber-coated kickstands made it fairly stable. With a somewhat dull blade, it struggled to get through dense carrot, and celeriac just jammed up against the blades. It couldn’t slice foods thinly at all, and when it did slice or julienne, it did so somewhat unevenly; we also couldn’t alter the thickness of the julienne settings themselves. Thickness settings didn’t correspond to actual millimeter measurements, and changing them meant ratcheting up a rotating wheel of blades that sat scarily underneath the glass platform. Finally, its hand guard was useful only half of the time; once the food got sliced down to the level of the prongs that secured it to the guard, we couldn’t use it anymore.

This V-slicer mandoline came with a lot of extra blades, but even its most basic ones didn’t hit the mark. At best, it was capable of slicing both thinly and thickly. But whether it was because the blades themselves were dull, or because they flexed so much as we pressed food through them, this mandoline struggled to cut evenly and consistently, instead producing slices that mimicked its blade’s V-shape. Its hand guard was useful only as long as the food was bigger than the prongs that secured it; once the food wore down, we couldn’t advance it without popping it off the guard entirely. With no clear thickness settings, we had to experiment to find the right depth at which to slice. And while it came with two kickstands, they lacked rubber feet, so it wasn’t as stable as we’d have liked.

Since we last tested mandolines, our standards and priorities have changed. Our former favorite remains pretty easy to use; to change the style or thickness of the cuts, we just had to swap out the blade platforms. And it’s still compact and relatively easy to store. But we were less satisfied with the performance, consistency, and variety of the slices offered. The V-shaped blade proved somewhat flimsy and flexible, sagging as we pressed food against it and producing uneven, inconsistent slices and julienne; the V-shape of the blade was replicated in everything it sliced. The blade was also somewhat dull, so celeriac and carrot got stuck on it. Worse, though, the mandoline’s functions were really limited: We could slice in only two thicknesses, and neither was very thin or very thick. Finally, with no kickstand and no rubber bumper or feet to help secure it to the counter, it slid around a ton while we struggled to push the food through.