A spiral slicer is a device which literally cuts your vegetables into long thin spirals. It’s what you use, for example, to make curly fries from potatoes.
Anywhere you look in the raw food world you’ll see a recommendation to get a spiral slicer, and pretty much everyone recommends the Saladacco spiral slicer, by Joyce Chen.
Raw food folks use them on things like zucchini, using a very fine-toothed angel hair blade, to make an angel hair “pasta” out of the vegetable. It’s quite spiffy, really.
But the thing which is amazing is that everyone recommends the Saladacco, and by all accounts – and reviews – the Saladacco, well, sucks.
Every review site which offers customer reviews gives it two big thumbs down. Yet nearly every raw food site recommends it.
Here are some representative reviews, from Amazon:
“I had to give this product two stars for the concept and at least one star because it does exactly what the manufacturer says it does, but nothing more plus not everything you make using this product turns out completely awful. Versatile this tool is not! To start your vegetables must be 1-inch in diameter and 3-1/2 inches in length. After you’ve finished cutting you are left with at least 1-inch of unusable vegetable, unless you’re willing to do the rest of your creative cutting by hand, not only does this limit you but it also creates a great deal of waste. You have only 2 blade choices which are housed in a poorly constructed plastic contraption that easily separates if pressed on in the wrong spot.”
And…
“Also, it’s a huge struggle to get the top separated from the base when I’m doing using the spiralizer. My pieces usually come out looking like spirals that have been scored, but not cut, by the blades with occasional strands of zucchini pasta mixed in. Maybe the zucchini has to have a water content in a certain range, and Jupiter has to align with Mars?
Just as I wouldn’t recommend a car that didn’t start 90% of the time, I can’t recommend the Joyce Chen spiralizer.”
And finally…
“I thought that it couldn’t be as bad as the other reviewers had written. Now I know that if you could have chosen zero stars, you would have. I have never, ever seen such a piece of junk that doesn’t come even close to doing what it says it can do.”
And it has reviews like that all over the net.
So why do all of these sites recommend the Joyce Chen Saladacco spiral slicer?
I can only assume it’s because none of them are aware that Benriner also makes a spiral slicer, and it works beautifully.
Now, it’s true that the Saladacco spiral slicer is only about $25.00, and the Benriner (also sometimes called a vertical spiral slicer) is about $65.00. But you will get so much use out of the Benriner spiral slicer, and you will get nothing but annoyance from the Saladacco, so which is the money better spent?
The difference in the two spiral slicers is obvious just looking at them:
Saladacco spiral slicer
Benriner spiral slicer
I use our Benriner spiral slicer all the time, and it’s great!
If you are in the market for a spiral slicer, you can get a Benriner spiral slicer here:
