Still, if you still feel some trepidation, you can always use the finger guards that come with them. Some people, professional chefs and home cooks alike, think that these guards feel clumsy, so instead, we recommend buying a pair of cut-resistant gloves to use with your mandoline. These allow you to grip your produce and wield it as you’d like, all the while protecting your hands from the blade.
NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves
How we tested mandolines
Most importantly, we took every mandoline mentioned in this story for a thorough test drive. We sliced (or tried to slice) through produce with a variety of textures to see what would make for the most versatile slicer. That included: fennel bulbs, cucumbers, radishes, apples, heads of cabbage, and hearty sweet potatoes. For mandolines with adjustable settings and multiple blades we used each of them to see if each slicer could produce everything claimed on the packaging. We also compiled intel from slicing pros in our test kitchen and out in the world to give us more information about what we should expect from a good mandoline. Shilpa Uskokovic is our senior test kitchen editor, and Jess Damuck is a recipe developer and cookbook author who has an affinity for vegetable-forward dishes that rely on mandolines as demonstrated in her two cookbooks.
Other mandolines we tested
The Zyliss 2-in-1 Handheld Slicer has a micro-serrated blade, which didn’t cut as cleanly as our winners. While the serration helped cut through tougher vegetables, it left tears on more delicate foods instead of clean, even slices from straight-blade mandolines. Still, we liked how sturdy it was, and the button-activated julienne slicing mode is a well-designed feature.
We struggled with the handle on the Chef’n Sleek Slice, which has a collapsable handle but no clear instructions on how to make use of it. After some fiddling, we finally realized that you need to squeeze the green part of the handle to unlock the legs for stability. Overall, though, it just wasn’t as sharp as we would have liked, bruising and tearing more delicate vegetables rather than slicing them.
Oxo’s V-slicer cut well, but it felt like it had too many moving pieces and was more complicated than our winners. We appreciated how sturdy it was and how well each setting locked in, but the jumps between settings were too big, and left us with slices that were too thick or too thin. And while we liked that it came with four different blades (a straight one, a wavy one and two sizes of julienne) both the julienne blades snagged more than we’d have liked.
We found the Swissmar Börner V-Power Mandoline awkward and clunky—changing the blades, mounted on large pieces of plastic, took very steady hands. The blade height adjustment was also tricky, and hard to precisely lock into for the thickness we were looking for. The blade was sharp, however, and it allowed us to get very thin slices of cucumber.
With a minimum setting of 1mm, the Mueller Multi Blade Adjustable Mandoline just couldn’t get thin enough for our liking. And while we appreciated the five blade options, we didn’t think any of them were sharp enough for regular usage. We also didn’t think the grating accessories were necessary—a simple box grater has more blades per square inch of its surface area, making it considerably more efficient and effective. Overall, the Mueller was bulky and didn’t perform as well as our winners.
The Rösle Gourmet Slicer is small, and much better suited for shaving truffles over pasta than slicing vegetables for meal prep. Its narrow slicing plane meant that most foods we tested were wider than the blade itself, making it nearly impossible to use. Still, the blade was sharp, and its adjustment knob was very secure. If you have a black truffle nut in your life, this might be a nice gift for them.
The Dash Safe Slice has real limited utility. Everything you want to cut must fit neatly into a chute before you can cut, leaving this as more of a guillotine than a mandoline. That meant we needed to trim down sweet potatoes and even some thicker cucumbers in order to slice them. It kept our fingers far away from the cutting edge, but most mandolines come with a finger guard, anyway. It also cuts everything on a bias, leading to oblong slices of everything we tested. Its safety design didn’t outweigh its limitations, and for that, we don’t recommend this slicer.
This handheld slicer from Microplane had big safety issues off the bat—the julienne blade attachment consistently dislodged from the back of the mandoline when slicing food with the V-shaped blade. We also found that the blade snagged and tore food, which tended to get stuck right at the point where the two sides of the blade met. Duller than the competition and potentially dangerous, we had to rule out the Microplane as a viable option.
We really liked that the Gramercy Adjustable Mandoline Slicer was made from sturdy stainless steel, but we weren’t fans of the price tag that came along with the premium material. Price was one factor keeping this mandoline out of a winner’s spot; performance was the other. Its removable blade had a number of adjustable settings, but overall it just wasn’t as sharp as our winners. Most tougher foods required a bit more muscle for clean cuts, and by the end of food prep our arms were tired.
The OXO Good Grips Chef’s Mandoline Slicer 2.0 has a unique slider to indicate the height of its thickness settings, but ultimately it wasn’t enough to make this mandoline a winner. In testing, the blade was duller than much of the competition, and it struggled to cut evenly through sweet potatoes. We did appreciate the built-in storage for its interchangeable blades and the included shuttle, but both are features that were common on a lot of the models we tested.
What to do with your mandoline
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