— Kathlyn Roth

Mandolins can be scary and I've known many, many people to lose the end of their fingertips using them. So, uh, they, you know, a good mandolin, um, sh it shouldn't be too hard to be able to put together and clean. Um, one thing I always recommend using with, uh, mandolin is using a cut glove. They saw a glove that basically makes it so you can't really cut through it using a knife or a mandolin or anything like that. I highly recommend using those with mandolins. I personally do it every time I use 'em mandolin, and I've been using them for years and years. I just do it as a safety precaution cause I've seen so many people that have lost the ends of their fingertips using a mandolin from just moving them over. Now, uh, as far as your question on knife skills, yeah, your knife skills could get so good that you can cut as thin as a mandolin. Um, you know, but it takes years and years and years of practice to be able to get there. Um, and quite honestly, even most chefs that I know, if you're going to do something like shred cabbage, they're going to use something like a mandolin or a food processor to be able to, uh, you know, uh, get that specific cut. There are so certain techniques, like if you're doing like a zucchini to be able to get it so paper thin that it curls really easy to put around a salad or use a zucchini noodles or ribbons or something like that, that a mandolin is something that's just so perfect because it gets such a uniform cut on it. Whereas the hand, even if it's really precise, you can still get a little variation in the top versus the bottom of the cut just because of pressure. Um, so mandolins definitely something, you know, over years, uh, you know, you'll get better at your cutting by hand, but mandolins are just one of those things. If you're looking for certain cuts and repetitive, like thousands of them, mandolins might just be your best bet on it. But also remember that most food processors actually, uh, have um, uh, some sort of mandolin setting on them. It's a disc that goes on the top that'll either shred things or, um, do a small cut on them too. So those are actually great things to do as well. Uh, also not the greatest to clean, but it gets the job done.