Vegetable Onion Chopper Gadget – As Seen On TV
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This chopping tool is designed to chop onions and other vegetables into small pieces – you have probably seen a lot of advertisements for these choppers on TV. There are several companies that manufacture these onion choppers, and the choppers are virtually identical. The vegetable chopper brand on the top picture is Progressive. I also used to have a very similar looking chopper that was called Vidalia Onion Chopper, and it looked and worked pretty much the same way. The only difference was that Vidalia had 2 kinds of interchangeable blades – for larger dice and smaller dice, and Progressive has just one kind of blade.
Here’s how vegetable and onion chopper gadgets work: you put the onion on top of the blade, push down hard with a level cover and the onion gets chopped. The chopped onion pieces go into the bottom basket that’s under the blade.
Is the vegetable chopper gadget worth using? Well, it depends on how many vegetables you need to chop. If it’s just a couple of onions, I do it by hand – see the easiest way to chop an onion. If I need to chop a lot of vegetables and the shape of the chopped pieces doesn’t really matter, I use the food processor. If there are lots of things to chop and the pieces have to be uniform size, then I use this vegetable chopper tool.
Chopping onions with this vegetable chopper tool is quicker than chopping them by hand. So why don’t I use it for just one or two onions? Because cleaning the chopper gadget is a pain! If you look at the above picture, see those white plastic squares on the left side on the lid – they push the onion through the blade when the lid gets lowered. Well, the tiny pieces of onion get stuck between those plastic squares, and then you have to clean them out with a special little white plastic fork that comes with this gadget. So it’s a tradeoff between chopping time and cleaning time – do I chop quicker and then have to clean the vegetable chopper tool, or do I spend more time chopping and only have to wash the knife?
One recipe that I always use the vegetable chopper for is recipe for Russian potato salad Olivier. In this salad, there is truly a lot of chopping – you need to chop potatoes, carrots, pickles, onion, apple and bologna. The vegetable chopper tool really speeds up the process, so I can make this salad really fast.
Here are some pictures of using the vegetable and onion chopper tool –
A slice of bologna is placed on top of the blade, really to be chopped:
The chopped cover is being lowered:
Pressing the lid down to chop the bologna:
Now bologna is chopped in a perfect dice!
Here’s a huge bowl of salad ingredients that were chopped in less than 5 minutes in the onion chopper:
Here’s the yummy Russian potato salad Olivier made from those ingredients:
Looks good! It is mainly for the perfectionists, I guess. Has it got the power to chop hard veggies like carrot and beets? I love really helpful gadgets. Should check the price first. Thank you for the information.
It can chop hard vegetables, as long as you first slice them into 1/4-inch slices. For the carrots it means slice them lengthwise in half. If the vegetable is really hard, put one slice at a time, for softer vegetables, you can put all the slices in at once. The price for this vegetable chopper is around $15.
I have a Progressive with two blades and have a friend who wants one.
Where are they sold?
Hi Neva
Check your local Target or Walmart – they probably sell them.
Melanie
One of the things that put me off about cooking in the first place was all the chopping.
This little gadget has alleviated all that and I couldn’t cook without it! I eat at home much more often – used to eat out because I didn’t like to cook.