The Simple Kitchen Tool That Gets Salads On The Table Much Quicker

In an effort to eat healthier or to get more vegetables into your diet or simply to eat something refreshing, you're preparing a salad for yourself or your family. But then, midway through making the salad at home, you realize that assembling a salad is actually more tedious and time consuming than you thought it would be! Not only does it take time to thoroughly wash the produce, but chopping all of the ingredients is a real time-sucker. 

You could opt to purchase veggies that are already chopped for you, but not all produce is offered pre-cut, the price is often more expensive, and the quality of pre-cut produce isn't always the best. Well, there's one kitchen tool you may already have tucked away in one of your kitchen drawers that you never knew could do all this prep work for you in mere seconds — yes seconds! This tool is the humble egg slicer.

If you struggle to quickly slice, dice, or chop any kind of ingredient (not just produce for salads) go ahead and join the club in filing this idea away in the "why didn't I think of that?" category. After you read about what this underrated slicer is capable of, you may just find yourself preparing a new salad recipe everyday. Keep in mind that the quality and sharpness of the metal wires in your egg slicer will determine what veggies or other ingredients you'll be able to slice. 

A durable egg slicer used with a bit of force can slice through just about any soft ingredient and most raw produce. A few examples include tomatoes, boiled potatoes, cucumbers, apples, onions, avocado, celery sticks, hard or soft-boiled eggs, berries, small mushroom varieties, soft cheeses, or olives — the possibilities really are endless with a good quality egg slicer. On the other hand, if you have an egg slicer with thin metal wires, it's probably best to stick with slicing softer items for your salad. And speaking of slicing, did you know this little tool can also dice? 

To dice something using an egg slicer, proceed in making the usual vertical slices but when you lift the ingredient out of the slicer, keep it in it's original form (even though it's sliced) and place it back on the slicer, this time in a horizontal direction. Give it another slice and now you have a dice!

In mentioning a few examples of egg-slicer-acceptable ingredients, you might have noticed long-shaped veggies made the list (such as celery and cucumber), which may have left you scratching your head as to how in the world that would work. The answer is to first use a quality chef's knife to chop the long veggie the same length or a bit shorter than the slicing wires, then simply turn the veggie horizontal on the egg slicer to create slices. No matter how you use it, an egg slicer is an "egg-cellent" slicing tool that'll save you time in the kitchen when it comes to slicing (or dicing) just about anything.