I’ve seen some extreme measures taken to avoid onion vapors and the torrent of tears they cause in the kitchen. Onion goggles, KN95 masks, wet towels worn around the face, even full-on respirators — some of them work with varying degrees of success, but they’re also cumbersome if not downright ridiculous. But I recently found something called the Mueller Vegetable Chopper online to save myself the grief and I have to say — it’s pretty cool.
Chopping, even non-suffocating vegetables like peppers and celery, can be fraught without the right kitchen knife, or more commonly, if your knife skills aren’t up to “Iron Chef” level, and even if they are, it’s fairly tedious work. A food processor can chop veggies, but it doesn’t create nice uniform shapes and sizes to cook evenly, and more often reduces veggies to a mushy pulp.
So for those of us who end up looking like we just watched the end of “Old Yeller” on repeat when chopping onions and are more likely to chop off a fingertip than quickly and effectively dice veggies, the Mueller Vegetable Chopper is a gift from the kitchen gods. I freely admit this was a total impulse buy, but it has quickly become the best kitchen tool I’ve bought in ages, and easily the most used.
Let’s slice open the details in my Mueller Vegetable Chopper review to prove that this is worth trying.
Mueller Vegetable Chopper
Pros
- Very easy to use
- Dishwasher safe
- Affordable
- Exceptionally sharp
Cons
- Removing food from narrow slicing blades can be difficult
- Easy to cut yourself trying to remove food
| Material | Plastic |
| Cleaning | Dishwasher safe (top rack) |
| Included Blades | 4 |
| Container Size | 4 cups |
| Included in the Box | Mueller Vegetable Chopper, Wavy Blade, 6.8mm Dicing Blade, 13.6mm Dicing Blade, Cross Blade, cleaning brush |
Mueller Vegetable Chopper Features
Part of the Mueller Vegetable Chopper’s beauty lies in its simplicity. This kitchen tool’s ergonomically friendly chopping unit sits on top of a 4-cup food-grade plastic container and has four interchangeable, and remarkably sharp, German 420-grade hardened stainless-steel blade units. It’s all you get and all you need to make your food prep much faster, far more effective, and tear-free.
All the parts of the Mueller Vegetable Chopper are dishwasher-safe, and there’s a small brush included to help get stubborn chunks out from the part of the chopping arm which pushes the food through the cutter. The blades are held in place with a quick slide of a locking button and are just as easily removed.
Using the Mueller Vegetable Chopper
Onion choppers are, as you could imagine, very common and very popular — a quick Amazon search yields over 3,000 results. What makes the Mueller Vegetable Chopper special? Ease of use, for starters. Just peel and halve or quarter the onion, place it on the blade, and push down on the arm.
The four included blades feature two dicers, which measure .26 inches for a fine chop and .53 inches for a larger one, in addition to a wavy blade for carrot or zucchini sticks and a cross blade for large chunks. I find the cross blade is ideal if you cut your potatoes before boiling them to make mashed potatoes.
PRO TIP: Don’t forget to add some milk.
Word to the wise — the blades are sharp, and if you’re cleaning them yourself rather than the dishwasher, watch your fingers. The advantage, of course, is that you don’t need to Hulk Up to get the arm down and through even tough root vegetables like carrots or parsnips, and the evenly cut pieces fall nicely into the plastic container below, ready to be added to a pot or pan, moved to a bowl, or even covered with plastic wrap and stored.
The Verdict: Do You Need a Mueller Vegetable Chopper?
Do you enjoy cooking, or does the idea of chopping and dicing and other prep work have you reaching for your phone to order a pizza? Cooking should be fun, but unless you have a dedicated sous-chef, prep work sucks and can take the fun out of the actual cooking.
For under $30 and precious little cabinet or shelf space, the Mueller Vegetable Chopper is a terrific prep-work hack that will save your time, your eyes, your fingertips, and at least a good part of your sanity. This is an easy verdict: a solid and enthusiastic yes.
