I guess these days most mandoline also comes with a safety holder, but like gloves, many people do not use these.
Amen. I have good knife skills, but it would be painstakingly slow to make absolutely perfect, equal slices of anything. So if such perfection is required, I use the mandoline with all the safety features. It is still much faster than a knife. Of course if “roughly the same” works, the knife pulls ahead. I find at the age of seventy-five and cooking only for my wife and self, occasionally a few dinner guests, speed with anything happens instinctively, but it is often better for me to slow down and enjoy it. Using a mandoline when you are not in a hurry is kind of an enjoyable change of pace.
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Dang. And people are still paying for saber scars!
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My husband bought me a mandoline for x-mas. I think before we got married. He added a cut resistant glove because he was worried about safety. I rolled my eyes at him at the time but I love them. First because the guards they sell with those things are useless but also because they are great for chucking oysters. If I did not have the glove, I still would not use that guard. A flat palm with all fingers up is sufficient.
I mainly use mine for scallop potatoes and coleslaw. The truth is, unless I’m feeling fancy, I usually grab a knife instead. Still, I enjoy having it for the few times a year that I use it. Mine is a Bron. I sometimes wonder if I would use one of the lighter plastic ones more just because it would be easier to grab.
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A very talented dermatolgy surgeon did wonderful stitch work. After 20 years and lots of vitamin E, good genes and the aging process you can barely see the scar. So lucky the eye on that side was missed.
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I used my mandoline for the same thing last week, cutting the onions as thin as possible. My knife skills are decent but I couldn’t have cut them as thin without the mandoline.
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Wahine scrubbed for a group of plastic surgeons who did amazing injury repair work. Glad your friend was not disfigured.
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oh dear . . . guess what shows up on this list…
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Whew. I worried they’d be recommending gold high-tops and a MAGA bible.
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Time to branch out to gold clogs and a MAGA ATK.
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One of my very first responsibilities when I started at a Japanese restaurant was to cut cucumbers for sunomono. I don’t know how many cucumbers we did on a daily basis, but IIRC we got a lug box every few days. SOP was to grab two or three cukes at a time to run them through the mandoline, filling a plastic tub of wafer-thin slices. It turns out that that task was saved for ‘the new guy’, because within a month or two, I had gotten promoted to other prep work and the newest guy was consigned to cucumber duty.
I did cut myself a few times. I think everybody did. It was sort of a rite of passage. You establish a rhythm with the cucumbers on the mandoline, not really paying attention and kind of zen-ing out, when, “DAMMIT! SON OF A BITCH!”, you realize you just sliced the tip of a finger off.
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This perfectly expresses what happens. It’s a moment of slight inattention or distraction that does it. And I’ve never met a person who lasers 100% their attention 100% of the time. Maybe spacewalking mechanic astronauts or bomb squad technicians…
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In a Professional Kitchen
Amen!
The same goes for Vinly/Latex Gloves.
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One of my pet peeves is gloves in a commercial kitchen. In theory, they’re a good idea. In practice, they’re dangerous, IMO. The problem is that when you wear gloves in a commercial kitchen, you start to think that you’re wearing gloves to keep your hands clean. After all, that’s their purpose just about everywhere else you might wear gloves (outside a medical facility).
I used to patronize a well-known and very popular bakery/cafe on a nearly daily basis for years. It was across the street from my office, and a group of us would take our coffee breaks there. One day I noticed an employee take a tub of some kind of spread - garlic, maybe - out of the fridge and put it in the microwave to warm it up. The process would take a couple of minutes, and he would periodically stop the microwave, pull the tub out, stick his gloved finger in to test the temperature, and then either put it back in the microwave or carry it off to his prep station. So far, no problem, right? Except that while the tub was in the microwave, he would pick up a newspaper with the same gloved hand, or rub his gloved hand on the back of a chair adjacent to the microwave, or fidget/hit the swivel top of the trash can lid that was next to that chair with his gloved hand. Clearly, he did not understand why he was wearing gloves. He may have even been proud that he only had to wear one pair of gloves for the entire shift.
It’s my belief that gloves in a commercial kitchen give the wearer a false sense of security. A better and safer strategy would be to ban gloves for food prep and drill into the food handlers that they have to wash their hands ALL THE FREAKIN’ TIME, constantly throughout their shifts, whether or not they think they need to.
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Fox News ‘Influencers’, whuddaya expect?
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Consistency in size for presentation and for consistent cooking times was hammered into to me since I was eleven and all the way through professional training and employment in European kitchens. If you can achieve that at all times and in all places with a knife, then my hat is off to you. The rest of the developed world uses mandolines. They were, and are, ubiquitous in every kitchen I ever worked. If they scare you, get a glove and wear it. Use the pusher. Own several gloves. Wash them. Who told you you could only have one?
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I went through this line of reasoning 5 years ago with a Restaurant Health Inspector, She heartily agreed.
It actually ENCOUREGES dangerous behavior.
Add to that Owners/Managers who issue a limited number of Gloves per shift and you have a bad situation.
Not to mention the consumption/waste it creates.
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…and maybe visit the toilet.
Yes, along with re-gloving and using hand sanitizer.
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No, I think gloves have no place in a commercial kitchen. Hand sanitizer? Yes, absolutely!
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