The Classic Gadget I Did not Anticipate to Love—That Makes Veggies Crunchy and Deliciously Dippable

Regardless of our shared final identify, my grandmother hated cooking. She was notorious in our household for utilizing her oven as a cupboard for potato chips and sliced bread. And but, once I helped clear out the kitchen after she died, I discovered dozens of mid-century kitchen implements I could not hope to call. A fork with eight tines. An Iron Maiden the dimensions of an egg. A terrifying vessel formed just like the decapitated head of a winking, coquettish cat.

Probably the most intriguing of those was a corrugated stainless-steel blade with an overhead Bakelite deal with. It seemed like a funhouse guillotine. 

“It is a crinkle-cutter,” my mother scoffed. 

So, sure: a funhouse guillotine. 

On the time, I considered crinkle-cutting largely as a retro affectation, or a patronizing technique for making greens extra palatable to youngsters. However the advantages of a crinkle-cutter are greater than aesthetic. Crinkle-cutting maximizes floor space, boosting texture, crunch, and condiment absorption for all types of meals—fries, carrots, pickles, and far more.

Now, I acknowledge crinkle-cutting because the area of great cooks and eaters. When you expertise the dip-smuggling energy of a crinkle-cut carrot, you will by no means need to put a boring, easy carrot stick on a relish tray once more.

The Life-Altering Magic of Crinkle-Slicing

When weighing when to crinkle-cut, suppose like an engineer. There is a cause you see corrugated metallic on roofs and pole barns and corrugated cardboard in delivery supplies. Corrugations make supplies stronger and stiffer. Crinkle-cutting meals can equally enhance their crunch, rigidity, and grip.

Due to its surface-area-boosting powers, crinkle-cutting is particularly useful for roasted or fried meals, the place you need to maximize crispness and crunch. I’ve used mine for cottage fries, French fries, thick-cut Saratoga chips—even roasted and grilled potato slices. The ridges additionally provide extra pockets for spices and sauces to settle into, boosting taste together with texture. 

However the advantages transcend roasted and fried meals. Crinkle-cutting can enhance crunch (and visible curiosity) in a giardiniera or Mexican escabeche. It may possibly additionally give uncooked or slippery fruit and veggies extra grip: A crinkle-cut pickle chip is much less more likely to slide off your burger between bites; a crinkle-cut banana slice is much less more likely to ooze out of your Elvis-style peanut butter sandwich.

I’ve even come round to crinkle-cutting purely for aesthetic attraction. Does it make meals appear like they teleported from the Atomic Age? Positive. However we’re post-modernist delicacies now: Slightly kitsch is nice. I like to recommend slicing hard-boiled eggs with a crinkle-cutter to make particularly fairly deviled eggs, or including corrugated slices of carrots and cukes to a mayonnaise-slicked Midwestern pasta salad.

Will It Crinkle-Minimize?

The reply to “Will it crinkle-cut?” is normally “Sure.” The guardrails are fairly clear. You shouldn’t use a crinkle-cutter to flense a fragile fish, or to debone a rooster (except the rooster has actually bizarre bones). 

However some exceptions are much less apparent. I do not advocate crinkle-cutting most alliums—a wavy cutter will wreak havoc on the cell partitions of garlic and onions, releasing extra of their sharp and sulfurous taste compounds. I additionally keep away from crinkle-cutting delicate meals like tomatoes, because the cutter is extra more likely to crush them than slice them.

Crinkle-cutters, like serrated knives, boring over time and might be significantly robust to sharpen at residence. Which means I do not bust out my hand-me-down cutter for any activity that requires paper-thin slices or a razor-sharp blade. 

My classic funhouse guillotine is not the one technique to crinkle, after all. Wavy blades can be found for a lot of mandoline slicers and meals processors, they usually might help obtain thinner, extra uniform slices. However I favor the hand-held varieties for one cause—they’re extra versatile, particularly if you wish to use your cutter for extra ornamental work or garnishes. How else might one obtain the intricate cuts essential to make webbed carrot ft for a squash goose? 

I do not know whether or not my grandmother ever made a squash goose. I am unsure she used the crinkle-cutter in any respect (I do know she used the terrifying cat vessels). However I am grateful to her for the introduction. We will all profit from the crinkle-cutter’s texture-amping skills. However we are able to additionally profit from its aesthetic reminder: We should always all preserve taking part in with our meals.