The picture makes it look kind of awkward. Is it really superior to just tossing it in a food processor or running it over a mandolin? Sure youāll get individual shreds instead of one looooong noodle, but is that a problem?
Those are great for making your radish garnishes, or carrot threads for Sushi or Sashimi at home.
And threads of potatoes warped with a bit of cornstarch to act as glue and wrapped around a fish and fried on both sides; having it a long ānoodlesā makes it easier to wrap and hold itās shape when in the pan.
I do not own a food processor, and donāt have a mandolin. There are other tools that either cost more or require different skills. This is the tool I felt like thirty bucks or so was well spent on. But yes there are other ways to do what Iām describing here.
Itās not awkward, no.
Thatās a neat gadget, but Iām looking at that and thinking ālatheā. Hand-turned vegetable goodness. 
I love this thing! I found out about old fashioned hand-cranked apple and potato peelers when I was a kid hanging out in antique shops, but I never knew that this spiralizer thing existed.
We would have had great fun with one of these when our son was little - or even now that heās grown, if he were still living locally. I think that a fruit and veggie noodle salad would be great!
Itād be neat to make āpastaā out of fruit, like melon, pear, or apple. Thatās a cool idea.
The Drawback of a Mandolin is each and every one of them requires a blood sacrifice at one point. Yeah, I know your supposed to use the guard every timeā¦and if you do itāll still jump up and bite you from the dishwasher.
Surely you have a ukulele though.
Iām going to assume that a mandolin is not what Iām picturing.
Do you have a potato ricer? If you squeeze ice cream through that into noodles and top with a rasberry jam you can make a desert spaghetti. http://www.staceypageonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/spaghetti-ice-cream.jpeg
Top with shredded white chocolate for the cheese.
Hey! itās a treat not a life style.
They scare me! This device scares me less.
oh shit that sounds amazing
O yes. How many people have worked fast food, and run afoul of the tomato/onion dicer, or the cheese shredder?
I use one of these: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Julienne-Shredder-Peeler-Slicer-Knife-Kitchen-Aid-/290993947275
Great for making Som Tum when you can get hold of a Green Papaya. Mmmmm. Som Tum.
I just made my first sacrifice to my new Microplane grater last night. Stupid cuticle.
It depends on a Potato Ricer. A device most people might not have, Itās very specialized. used to āriceā boiled potatoes. For super fluffy mashed potatoes (I like my mashed potatoes non-fluffy tho).
But this is another use for the tool. Other uses for the potato ricer (Itās basically a very large garlic press device with really big holes) is making Cole slaw. Salt your cabbage and squeeze out the water after it sits with the rice and rinse in the ricer. That saves on towels.
Or Squeezing out moisture from thin sliced salted cumbers without using lots of towels. Great for Sunomo Japaneese salads, or the one I use the most. Squeezing out water from frozen spinach thatās lightly microwavedā¦or even boiled fresh spinach; for use in Japaneese dishes, or white pizza.
Basically any application where a āpressā with large holes would be used for salted and rinsed veggies. Or for itās original purpose āricing potatoesā.
Hummā¦I can see that being used to squeeze out your fermented veggiesā¦(to get rid of moisture) and then turned into crab cake type things with flour/egg etc. Maybe even higher protein cakes with sardines, trout, or other fish. Or Wellā¦Iām going on too much here.
My grandmother had one of the old school cast iron spiral apple slicers (which Iām surprised to see are apparently widely available for less than this plastic dealy). It was wildly impractical for regular use, but when you were pealing a couple hundred pounds of apples for vast quantities of apple sauce it was pretty necessary. Especially if you wanted to avoid slicing and coring. I would imagine this might be a little more reliable, and less finicky for frequent use. What with having a fixed, mandolin style blade. The little traveling blade on the old school ones was a bit shakey, but it did let you make curly fries.
Apple peelers are not the same as the posted device.
Apple peelers. (and thatās what Iām thinking your speak of here) are designed to spiral cut the only the outer skin of a appleāit peels an apple with a device that only goes in a few mm to take off the skin. And some devices had a coring option, and you could run the apple through a few times to threads.
The posted item doesnāt simply take off the skin of a veggieā¦but is more a lathe. The threads are taken out of the inner part of the veggie.
Yes the basic apple peeler just ran over the outside and took off a very thin layer of skin. But the one my grandmother had (and as near as I can tell many of the ones Iāve seen since) were capable of a few different things. My grandmotherās was set up with two blades, the standard one that shaved off the skin and a separate one that sliced the apple laterally. So you ended up with a pealed apple that had been sliced into a spiral the full thickness of the fruit to the core. You were basically peeling, slicing, and coring it in one go. There was some way of adjusting it or changing the blade (I was young donāt remember) so that you could take one pass to just pull off an ultra thin peel, and if you wished take another pass to take off thicker spirals of center flesh (suitable for curly fries) with multiple passes.
My point was this thing seems far more practical for daily use (and way less finicky, the apple peeler wasnāt pleasant to use). But as I would apparently need to peel and core anything I put on it I wouldnāt want to be running a 10 tree orchardās worth of apples through it. Thatās down to the fact that it has fixed blades mounted to plastic plates and the fruit/veg is pushed into/through it. Like a mandolin, rather than the traveling blade of the apple peeler. I donāt like plastic kitchen tools, but more moving parts is usually a bad thing. Same ideal though. Spin fruit/veg into blade (we did a lot of beets too, could do them raw saved time) usable flesh results.
