REVIEW – Stealing an old TV commercial line, ‘And – it makes julienne fries!’ The ONCE FOR ALL Mandoline Slicer can cut a lot of foods, a lot of ways. The company kindly sent a veggie and a meat slicer. This is the first mandoline slicer my wife and I have used and we proved we’re rookies at it. Some meat and veggies were seriously harmed in our testing. But our skill improved, we never cut ourselves, and I’ll show you how we came to a positive conclusion on the ONCE FOR ALL vegetable and fruit slicer.
What is it?
The ONCE FOR ALL Mandoline Slicer is an upright mandoline food slicer.
What’s included?
- ONCE FOR ALL Mandoline Slicer
- Catcher container
- Cleaning brush
- Instructions
Tech Specs
- Adjustable cutting from 0.1 – 8mm
- 420 stainless steel blades
- BPA-free, ABS plastic, stainless steel, dishwasher safe materials
- Colors: Green, blue, black & white, pink
- Slices, dices and juliennes
Design and features
The ONCE FOR ALL vegetable slicer is made of a sturdy, durable plastic and the blade is stainless steel. The device is not brittle and there is no ‘toy’ feel to it. The steel slicer is very sharp.
Suction feet for stability.
All parts are dishwasher safe, except for the food-holder piece of the meat slicer.
There are controls on the back of the mandoline slicing mechanism that allow for the thickness of the cut and the width and depth of the secondary blades which allow for slicing or shredding. The slicing mechanism releases by squeezing two tabs at the bottom and lifting the handle upwards. This separates the cutter mechanism from the stand and allows both to be cleaned.
The slicer is spring loaded so that the handle stays in the up position to be ready for the next cut. Mastering the springy action of the cutter is a bit different than using a traditional mandoline. After a few strokes on some cucumbers and our ‘test potato’ we got the idea.
I confess, I could not master the meat slicer. The meat slicer is basically a hand-held, multi-blade knife to be used with a meat holder. I saw online videos at Amazon of normal people using it successfully so I must be different. No matter how I tried to cut the meat, when doing the cutting action, the meat just rolled or leaned, back and forth in the slicer with my push and pull attempt at slicing. It worked better with extremely firm pressure, but are we supposed to be exhausted after slicing meat? One guy in a video was excited by the very thin cuts the meat cutter produced with the thin-cut blades in place. He cut raw meat and ours was cooked to medium rare, but was very tender. We concluded that we had more control with a good chef’s knife, even though it may take a few minutes more to produce the same amount of cut meat.
And cheese. We love cheese. Cheese didn’t really work with either slicer. This is on us – Nowhere did ONCE FOR ALL say either device was a cheese slicer, and they’re right!
We tried slicing soft and medium hard cheeses in both slicers. Just use a knife.
With cheese in the meat slicer we had the same issues as we did with meat and produced a messy, mangled serving not suitable for public presentation. The veggie slicer is a veggie slicer. Vegetables and hard fruit, like apples, are what it’s made for.
Food processor or mandoline? There’s interesting reading if you do that online search. Chefs use both, but seem to prefer the mandoline for precision cuts. The food processor is preferred for mass, speed slicing. We have a nice, name brand food processor but it came with two blade thicknesses for slicing, one thick and one thicker. Maybe other food processor blades are available but we now understand where a mandoline fits. And I can clean up the ONCE FOR ALL slicer faster than I can our food processor. Both have their place.
Assembly, Installation, Setup
A good instruction manual accompanies the ONCE FOR ALL slicer and once you know where the few parts fit, they snap or slide right in.
Performance
My best advice is to get a ‘practice potato’ or two, and see what you can do with the ONCE FOR ALL slicer.
Once we got the hang of how to operate the vegetable slicer it worked really well. Prep the veggies for slicing, decide on the desired thickness, determine the type of cut you want to make, and go to work. You can make cutting adjustments for thick, thin, thin shreds, long ‘french fry’ sized cuts, etc. You can cut zucchini, squash or cucumbers into round pieces or length-wise slices.
Pieces seemed to eject from the slicer on the upward lift of the blade mechanism and if I pulled up too hard, pieces launched beyond the catcher tray. That was just a matter of learning how to control the slicing action.
Examples of vegetables we ‘learned on’.
The ONCE FOR ALL Mandoline will take up a good bit of a drawer in the kitchen, so unless it is left on a counter-top, it’ll need storage space.
This is how the slicer looks after using it. Useful pieces would sometimes get caught in the slicer. The back of the cleaning brush was useful to remove the stuck item.
It is possible to slice with the veggie holder chute removed to push the item directly into the slicer blade. I probably won’t ever do that. If you must, there are metal mesh ‘cut-proof’ gloves available and I recommend them to you if you’re the adventurous type. See fishing supply stores or your favorite online shopping site.
Final thoughts
We can recommend the ONCE FOR ALL Vegetable slicer and all indications are that it would give years of reliable service. It seems to be at a good price compared to other quality mandolines on the market.
What I like about the ONCE FOR ALL Mandoline slicer
- Nicely constructed of durable materials
- Good color choices
- Excellent range of slicing options
- Easy to use after a bit of orientation and practice
What needs to be improved?
- No improvements needed for the veggie slicer
- The meat slicer didn’t work for us. (Or we with it?)
Where to buy: Amazon
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by ONCE FOR ALL and the company did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.
