Review - OXO V-Blade Mandoline

My wife wanted to make sweet potato chips for the game yesterday, so I finally had an excuse to buy a mandoline. I've wanted one for a while, but the need escalated when my friend kept saying SHE wanted one. Purchased the OXO V-Blade model, their lower-end mandoline, $50.

OXO International - V-Blade Mandoline

GOOD THINGS

All of the blades store in the device so there's nothing floating around in a drawer. Well, the 'bonus' dicer blades and spacer don't store in it, but they have their own sealed container.

PROBLEMS

I tried a few slices to get a feel for the machine using the straight blade and they turned out OK. I saw the waffle fries on the side of the box and decided to try that. They did not turn out that well.

I sliced through two big fat sweet potatoes and never figured out how to make 'perfect' waffles. Usually they were too thick on one side and too thin on the other. Since I was alternating the direction on the wavy slicer that meant that one side was solid, the middle was normal waffle and the other side turned into little fingers of potato. I tried using different pressures, mounting the potato deep into the holder and barely attached, and swapping 90 degrees back-and-forth as well as rotating 90 degrees every slice. Nothing fixed the problem.

Logically it seems like this is caused by too much pressure at the beginning of the stroke vs. the end, but I tried to press evenly, and sometimes with no pressure at all, and it still had the same problem.

It also makes sense that it could be because the up-blade side is at a different angle than the down-blade side. The thickness is changed by adjusting the attack angle of one of the sides. However, the blade is v-shaped, so it seems like it would be thin on both sides and thick in the middle, and this might actually be what's happening but the part that hits the blade first is thicker than the last part, so it still seems like a pressure issue.

The blades are sharp! This wouldn't be a problem except that the blades are not dishwasher safe--they have to be washed by hand. I'll have to buy a scrub brush to clean it if I decide to keep it. Cut myself twice on the thing.

The plastic stains. Two huge sweet potatoes was apparently more carotine than it could handle, so most of the white runway is now orange. It's not something that can be scrubbed off, but maybe bleach of some type will clean it.

CONCLUSION

I am going to try a few more things tonight to see if I can master the waffle cut. If I can't then I will reutrn this and buy the Borner v-slicer online.