The Benriner Super Slicer (Japanese Mandoline)is the sharpest tool in this category and the one most likely to hurt you. Both facts have the same cause: it is a professional kitchen’s mandoline, built around a superb blade and an extra-wide slicing surface, with almost nothing between that blade and your hand except your technique.
Why professionals choose it
Three reasons, and none of them are features in the marketing sense. The blade is exceptionally sharp and holds its edge, which matters because a dull mandoline blade is both worse at slicing and more dangerous — it requires more force, and force is what turns a slip into an injury. The slicing surface is extra-wide, so a large potato or a whole cabbage half passes without catching. And the screw-set thickness dial holds its setting under load rather than drifting, which is what you want when you are slicing a hundred potatoes rather than four.
It also takes three interchangeable julienne blades alongside the flat blade, so it produces matchsticks as cleanly as it produces slices — the cut a box grater fudges and a food processor generally cannot do at all.
Why it is not our overall pick
The guard. Benriner supplies a simple hand guard, and it is a long way behind the food holder and runway guard on the OXO Chef’s Mandoline. In a professional kitchen that is an acceptable trade: the people using it slice every day, they have been shown how, and they use a cut-resistant glove as a matter of course. In a home kitchen, where the tool comes out four times a year and nobody trained you, a minimal guard on the sharpest blade available is the wrong combination.
That is a statement about context, not quality. If you slice often, own a cut-resistant glove and have read our safety guide, the Benriner is arguably the best slicer here. If any of those three is not true, buy the OXO.
Buy the glove with it. A cut-resistant glove costs a small fraction of the mandoline and is the single most effective thing you can do about the risk. This is the pick where we would treat it as non-optional rather than as a nice extra.
Living with it
Set the thickness with the screw before you start, and check it after the first two slices — the setting is precise, which also means it is easy to be a hair off. Slice with long, smooth strokes rather than short jabs; the blade does the work and pushing harder just increases the chance of a slip. Change to a julienne blade only with the unit flat on the counter and your fingers on the plastic body.
For cleaning, rinse immediately with a brush and dry it standing up. The blade is carbon- sharp enough that a dishcloth will be shredded and a finger will not fare much better; treat it exactly as you would a chef’s knife left edge-up in a sink, which is to say, never put it in a sink.
How we picked
Tools we claim to have lab-tested: 0
Every site in this category tells you they ran twenty machines through a lab. We have not, and we say so. Here is what we do instead: read the manufacturer's manual and spec sheet, record the published bowl capacity, motor rating, blade and disc counts and materials, cross-check the warranty against the manufacturer's own warranty document, and cite all of it so you can check the work. Prices come live from Amazon's API and disappear rather than go stale.
The scores above are judgments from that documented research — not test results. The full rubric, including what disqualifies a product, is published in full.
