I understand the tool, we used to have one when I was younger. I’m just saying that a knife will do zero compression if the edge is properly sharp. Most people use knives that go dull quickly and never bother to sharpen them, but a good sharp knife is a game changer for any type of food prep.
A cheese slicer is just a convenience thing like an apple slicer.
I mostly use a mandolin for the same purpose anyways, but a mandolin is just the convenience of a sharp knife with more consistent uniformity.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 21 hours ago
Whilst my knife is unlikely to be sharp enough, I don’t have the hand skills to shave a 0.6mm wafer of cheddar off a block even with the best knife. My fine motor skills are excellent and I’m a professional miniature sculptor and have particular preferences on which specific scalpel blades I like to work with! My point being that I have significantly above average skills and that’s not sufficient.
If you happen to have the tools and skill to shave cheese that way, fantastic, well done you, but that’s an extremely uncommon set of circumstances. As you say, most people’s knives aren’t up to the task. Meanwhile even a child can use a cheese slicer to get a decent slice off a block.
…and yes, I did go and grab some calipers to check because I’m tired of this insane discussion. If you feel they’re a useless kitchen gizmo, cool, but lots of us love our cheese slicers because they’re tremendously useful and accessible.
vateso5074@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I love the effort of actually breaking out the calipers, sincerely gave me a chuckle!
Don’t get me wrong, no kitchen gizmo is useless if it gets the utility you need from it! If it’s something you use often, that’s worth it.
I just generally try to live by the idea that less is more, so I try to prioritize the things I use more often and find additional uses for things I already have instead of buying something new. For me it’s just that having a good kitchen knife provides a lot of inherent utility, and for someone who doesn’t need to slice cheese very often, it falls into the “good enough” niche.
But I’ve been in way too many home kitchens where they have 10 drawers full of all sorts of implements and gadgets that do exactly one thing and seemed neat when they bought it, yet they never get used more than once a year or two. We incur an environmental debt with most every product we buy, and that’s a lot of plastic and scrap metal waste that will need to be dealt with someday.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 19 hours ago
Whilst that’s perfectly sensible, our household has at least two cheese slicers in case one is in the dishwasher. They’re very common in Swedish households!