Are You Making This Dangerous Mistake with Your Mandoline Slicer?

We love our mandoline for getting paper-thin slices of produce like cabbage, radishes, and apples. Not so much our fingers!

Our editors and experts handpick every product we feature. We may earn a commission from your purchases.

Whether you’re making a salad, scalloped potatoes, or a delicious ratatouille, you’ll want to use the perfect slicing tool, a mandoline. It has super-sharp blades to make quick work of all your slicing prep. However, even the most graceful of mandoline “players” run the risk of a nicked finger. We know. We’ve been there! Ouch.

The mistake we’re all making

Mandolines come with a slicing guard or food holder that’s supposed to hold food in place and protect your fingers. It’s usually bulky, doesn’t grip food well, and leaves you with a pretty sizable chunk of unsliced produce. The guard also ends up mashing tomatoes (and other more delicate things) into a watery mess. It seems like the only option is to leave the guard behind and slice bare-handed. Looking for some safer tools to get your kids interested in cooking? Try some of the weirdest, most unique kitchen gadgets you won’t believe are real.

But we have a better solution.

How to keep your fingers safe

Cut Resistant Glovesvia amazon.com

We suggest investing in a pair of cut-resistant gloves. Amazon’s Choice for cut-resistant gloves is the delightfully named “NoCry” brand.

As powerful as your mandoline is, it’s no match for these gloves, which have a cut resistance four times stronger than leather. Yet they’re lightweight and because they come in four sizes (S, M, L, XL), they provide a snug grip no matter how small or large your hands are. Having a good grip is essential when you’re trying to tackle a precise slicing job. Oh—the gloves are also machine washable.

Bottom line: Go forth and “play” that mandoline, but please keep your fingers safe! Just like the cut resistant gloves, you’ll wish you had these handy kitchen gadgets years ago!

Taste of Home
Originally Published on Taste of Home

Lauren Cahn
Lauren has covered knowledge, history, the British royal family, true crime and riddles for Reader's Digest since 2017. Having honed her research and writing skills as an attorney in the 1990s, she became one of HuffPost's first bloggers in the early 2000s, graduated to reporting hyperlocal news in the 2010s and has been researching and writing news and features for a wide variety of publications ever since. Aside from Reader's Digest, her work has appeared in Mashed, Tasting Table, Eat This, Not That!, Grown and Flown, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Insider, Business Insider and many others.