Some kitchen gadgets make life easier in the kitchen.

Some kitchen gadgets look cool.

And some kitchen gadgets are overpriced pieces of crap that are way too much work to use than the original tool they were meant to replace.

I do a lot of chopping and dicing and cutting into little pieces in my quest to use fresh ingredients to make real, healthy food.  It’s my least favorite part of cooking.

So, in a moment of weakness in a William Sonoma store in Charleston, I splurged on a $50 chopper.

It slices!  It dices!  It has a citrus attachment!

And it’s a giant pain in the ass to use.  The multiple pieces are a nightmare to assemble, disassemble and clean – especially if all you need is to quickly chop an onion.

Aside from that, you have to pre chop a lot of things before you can use it in order to have pieces small enough to fit into the chopper.  And if the pieces are too big but you don’t realize it ahead of time because they sure as hell look like they’d be small enough to fit, you end up with a half chopped green pepper stuck in the blades.  And that’s fun to try to pry out of the itty bitty wires.

The absolute worst part of using this is the amount of pressure required to actually chop anything – even if it is small enough. I literally had to stand on a step stool so that I could put all of my body weight down on pusher in order to actually cut anything.

Pain. In. The Ass.

Come to find out, all I needed to make all the slicing and dicing and chopping easier was a good knife.

Calphalon Everyday Cutlery 7″ Santoku & 5″ Santoku

I picked up a Calphalon knife at the outlet store here for less than $25.

And it actually works.

And cleans off in about 2 seconds.

And did I mention it works?

Yeah. Turns out cutting food up isn’t supposed to be quite the ordeal I thought it was.  Or nearly as expensive.

Posted in Friday Flops: Products That Suck, Things For The Home Tagged: cooking, kitchen gadgets, knives, professional chopper, william sonoma