Mandolines: loved by salad eaters, feared by fingers. With what must be the highest body count of any kitchen tool after knives, mandoline slicers are tools that demand caution, reverence, and respect.
But, if you use a mandoline carefully, the rewards are immense. The best mandoline will help you speed through produce prep, make paper-thin slices of cucumber, grillable coins of zucchini, and shred cabbage, reducing an entire head to the thinnest shreds in about a minute for slaws and pasta salads.
- The best mandoline slicer overall: Benriner Super Slicer,
$80$75 at Amazon → Read more - The best mandoline slicer for beginners: Oxo Large Adjustable Hand Slicer, $29 at Amazon→ Read more
- The best mandoline slicer for smaller items: Oxo Good Grips Mini Grate and Slice Set, $23 at Amazon→ Read more
“I use my mandoline constantly. It’s a great way to shave vegetables into elegant ribbons and whisper-thin slices,” says Jess Damuck, many of whose recipes in her cookbooks Salad Freak and Health Nut make frequent use of the kitchen gadget. “My knife skills are okay—but the mandoline makes quick work of precise uniform cuts.”
If you’re intrigued by the possibilities a mandoline offers but aren’t quite sure what to look for—or are afraid you might lose some digits in the process—we are here to help. Below you will find our top picks for the best mandolines to grace your countertop, as well as some safety tips and additional equipment you can buy that will ensure that your mounds of freshly shaved vegetables remain carnage-free.
What is a Mandoline Slicer
If you're new to the idea of mandolines, they are, at their core, simple items with relatively similar designs. They are vegetable slicers that can produce uniform and consistent cuts more efficiently than slicing and dicing on a cutting board. Think of it as the halfway point between a knife and food processor. They consist of a plank bisected by a straight or V-shaped blade, with a small gap for vegetable slices to fall through. Sometimes they are adjustable to allow for varied widths, but many are fixed to a standard slice thickness.
Most models come with stainless-steel blades, but you can also find others, like this Kyocera, with a ceramic blade instead. Higher-end models typically come with a range of slicing attachments, like a blade for waffle cuts or a julienne blade.
Best Mandoline: Benriner Mandoline
You’d have to search high and low to find a culinary professional who recommends anything besides the Benriner mandoline. Damuck loves it. Food editor Shilpa Uskokovic uses it in the test kitchen all the time, as do countless other professional kitchens and home cooks
Much of that love has to do with the Benriner’s design. “The plastic makes it lighter and more nimble than unwieldy, old-fashioned stainless-steel models, tucking away neatly into a tiny kitchen drawer,” Shilpa says. “It’s spare and efficient in its industrial design—no clunky knobs, flimsy handles, imprinted numbers bound to wear off, or weird V-shaped blades.” The plastic crank on the bottom of the Benriner also allows you to select a thickness setting to an exacting degree. “You can cut kohlrabi thin enough to read a paper through or thick planks of potato for a gratin,” she says.
In our product tests, the Japanese mandoline’s incredibly sharp blade was unmatched by any other adjustable mandoline. It’s as agile and precise as a chef’s knife in expert hands and comes with three interchangeable blade styles for matchstick and julienne cuts of different widths.
The hand guard, a separate plastic piece you can use to hold down items like onions or cucumbers, is clunky and somewhat uncomfortable to hold. It’s not exactly what you want in a product’s main safety feature, which is why we suggest cut-resistant gloves down below for those who are still nervous about accidents. It’s also not dishwasher-safe (though it's easy enough to hand-wash). As Shilpa notes though, the plastic has a tendency to stain, especially when slicing carrots or beets.
Best Mandoline Slicer for beginners: Oxo Large Adjustable Handheld Slicer
For some people, a good mandoline is only defined by how sharp its blade is. For others, a mandoline is better defined by its usability—after all, what good is a mandoline in your cupboard if you’re too intimidated to use it? Oxo’s Large Adjustable Handheld Slicer is designed to make mandoline slicing easy enough for everyday cooking, and we loved its details.
To start, the Oxo slicer has a comfortable handle and rubber feet, making it easy to secure against a cutting board or counter. It also has an oversized hand guard to protect your fingers and an adjustment dial with seven clearly labeled settings in 0.5mm increments. But where the Oxo stands out is its see-through slicing plane—just past the blade, the plastic slicing surface is made of clear plastic so you can easily see whatever you just sliced. This is key to preventing sliced food from stacking so tall it causes the guard to snag on your next pass.
We also really liked that the blade locks securely into place for slicing and storage. It was the mandoline we felt most confident in setting up, and with everything clearly labeled, we didn’t even have to consult the user manual.
This isn’t a mandoline that can get fancy with julienne or waffle cuts because the single blade is permanently fixed inside the slicer. Oxo does make a larger mandoline that offers that functionality. We also wish the blade was just a hair sharper—during testing it required a bit more force than we’d like to get through fibrous vegetables like sweet potatoes. Still, we feel confident using this mandoline, and it was sharp enough to slice through everything without tearing.
Best Mandoline for Smaller Items: Oxo Good Grips Mini Complete Grate & Slice Set
If you are intimidated by the size of a mandoline’s blade, or only plan to use it for smaller items like garlic cloves, summer squash, or cucumbers, consider this tiny, handheld model from Oxo. The Good Grips Mini Complete Grate & Slice Set is ideal for mandoline experimentation and will have you feeling a bit safer while using it.
Instead of having a bunch of loose blades to swap out, these are actually three attachments that lock into a box: a straight blade, a grater, and a microplane. The straight blade is excellent for shaving veggies for salad, particularly radishes, brussels sprouts, or fennel. While you can’t adjust the thickness, it produced a finer cut than most people can easily achieve with a knife, all the while maintaining enough structural integrity to still have crunch.
While it will give consistent, thin slices, as well as grating and microplaning extras, this set, like Oxo’s handheld slicer, won’t produce crinkle-cut French fries or pristine carrot sticks. Safety-wise, it does come with a finger guard, but given the size of the items it’s best for, like garlic cloves, that guard isn’t the most useful and we found it easier to just slice carefully freehand.
What to know about mandoline safety
As mentioned a few times already, mandolines have…a bit of a reputation for sending people to the emergency room. However, if you are capable of using a regular old chef’s knife, you have nothing to be afraid of. The key to using a mandoline is to pay attention and not get carried away. “I like to work confidently with my mandoline and never use it while I’m talking to someone or distracted,” says Damuck. She also points out that dull mandoline slicers are actually the most dangerous (the same is true about knives), as they are more likely to get stuck and require you to leverage excessive weight and raise the risk you’ll cut yourself. Because of this, many mandoline producers offer replacement blades for the inevitable moment when yours gets dull.
Still, if you still feel some trepidation, you can always use the finger guards that come with them. Some people, professional chefs and home cooks alike, think that these guards feel clumsy, so instead, we recommend buying a pair of cut-resistant gloves to use with your mandoline. These allow you to grip your produce and wield it as you’d like, all the while protecting your hands from the blade.
How we tested mandolines
Most importantly, we took every mandoline mentioned in this story for a thorough test drive. We sliced (or tried to slice) through produce with a variety of textures to see what would make for the most versatile slicer. That included: fennel bulbs, cucumbers, radishes, apples, heads of cabbage, and hearty sweet potatoes. For mandolines with adjustable settings and multiple blades we used each of them to see if each slicer could produce everything claimed on the packaging. We also compiled intel from slicing pros in our test kitchen and out in the world to give us more information about what we should expect from a good mandoline. Shilpa Uskokovic is our senior test kitchen editor, and Jess Damuck is a recipe developer and cookbook author who has an affinity for vegetable-forward dishes that rely on mandolines as demonstrated in her two cookbooks.
Other mandolines we tested
The Zyliss 2-in-1 Handheld Slicer has a micro-serrated blade, which didn’t cut as cleanly as our winners. While the serration helped cut through tougher vegetables, it left tears on more delicate foods instead of clean, even slices from straight-blade mandolines. Still, we liked how sturdy it was, and the button-activated julienne slicing mode is a well-designed feature.
We struggled with the handle on the Chef’n Sleek Slice, which has a collapsable handle but no clear instructions on how to make use of it. After some fiddling, we finally realized that you need to squeeze the green part of the handle to unlock the legs for stability. Overall, though, it just wasn’t as sharp as we would have liked, bruising and tearing more delicate vegetables rather than slicing them.
Oxo’s V-slicer cut well, but it felt like it had too many moving pieces and was more complicated than our winners. We appreciated how sturdy it was and how well each setting locked in, but the jumps between settings were too big, and left us with slices that were too thick or too thin. And while we liked that it came with four different blades (a straight one, a wavy one and two sizes of julienne) both the julienne blades snagged more than we’d have liked.
We found the Swissmar Börner V-Power Mandoline awkward and clunky—changing the blades, mounted on large pieces of plastic, took very steady hands. The blade height adjustment was also tricky, and hard to precisely lock into for the thickness we were looking for. The blade was sharp, however, and it allowed us to get very thin slices of cucumber.
With a minimum setting of 1mm, the Mueller Multi Blade Adjustable Mandoline just couldn’t get thin enough for our liking. And while we appreciated the five blade options, we didn’t think any of them were sharp enough for regular usage. We also didn’t think the grating accessories were necessary—a simple box grater has more blades per square inch of its surface area, making it considerably more efficient and effective. Overall, the Mueller was bulky and didn’t perform as well as our winners.
The Rösle Gourmet Slicer is small, and much better suited for shaving truffles over pasta than slicing vegetables for meal prep. Its narrow slicing plane meant that most foods we tested were wider than the blade itself, making it nearly impossible to use. Still, the blade was sharp, and its adjustment knob was very secure. If you have a black truffle nut in your life, this might be a nice gift for them.
The Dash Safe Slice has real limited utility. Everything you want to cut must fit neatly into a chute before you can cut, leaving this as more of a guillotine than a mandoline. That meant we needed to trim down sweet potatoes and even some thicker cucumbers in order to slice them. It kept our fingers far away from the cutting edge, but most mandolines come with a finger guard, anyway. It also cuts everything on a bias, leading to oblong slices of everything we tested. Its safety design didn’t outweigh its limitations, and for that, we don’t recommend this slicer.
This handheld slicer from Microplane had big safety issues off the bat—the julienne blade attachment consistently dislodged from the back of the mandoline when slicing food with the V-shaped blade. We also found that the blade snagged and tore food, which tended to get stuck right at the point where the two sides of the blade met. Duller than the competition and potentially dangerous, we had to rule out the Microplane as a viable option.
We really liked that the Gramercy Adjustable Mandoline Slicer was made from sturdy stainless steel, but we weren’t fans of the price tag that came along with the premium material. Price was one factor keeping this mandoline out of a winner’s spot; performance was the other. Its removable blade had a number of adjustable settings, but overall it just wasn’t as sharp as our winners. Most tougher foods required a bit more muscle for clean cuts, and by the end of food prep our arms were tired.
The OXO Good Grips Chef’s Mandoline Slicer 2.0 has a unique slider to indicate the height of its thickness settings, but ultimately it wasn’t enough to make this mandoline a winner. In testing, the blade was duller than much of the competition, and it struggled to cut evenly through sweet potatoes. We did appreciate the built-in storage for its interchangeable blades and the included shuttle, but both are features that were common on a lot of the models we tested.
