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Kitchenwarez : Garlic Zoom
Filed under: Gadgets
In the kitchen, there are gadget people and then there are knife people. Gadget people are never content to rely upon a traditional, elegant solution to a food preparation problem, and instead use various colorful and wittily named gadgets. Knife people want to turn their sharpest knives on the gadget people resulting in a colorful and satisfying plume of blood and a cascade of the ever-intensifying screams, but do not ultimately do so for fear of somehow damaging the blade.
I have always thought of myself as a knife person, and, in fact, actually enjoy the vast majority of the tedious chopping / mincing / peeling / slicing / trimming that gadget people are happy to farm out to whatever piece of plastic is most colorful and readily available.
That said: sometimes garlic gets to be a little bit of a drag. At every meal — yes, just about everything including some sandwiches — garlic must be peeled and chopped. A garlic press just isn't suitable for many applications; sometimes "chopped" or "diced" is better than "pressed into a juicy, undifferentiated mass."
While walking through Kitchen Window the other day, I stumbled upon a garlic chopping device that was sensibility-defyingly interesting. The Garlic Zoom ($9.99) has all the Euro-plastic appeal of old-school Capsela toys, and much of the same geeky mechanical charm; its little rubber wheels turn an internal blade, thereby chopping up your (peeled) cloves into tiny little bits. The more you zoom the tiny garlic death car around, the smaller your final product becomes.
It works like a charm. And the clever plastic trapdoors very quickly release the chopped garlic and allow for quick rinsing. As an added bonus: the tactile stink of the plant is kept clear of your fingers.
The GarlicZoom is pleasurable to use, but — and this is a real testament to its actual usefulness — it's also a pleasure to reuse. You'll keep it on a counter somewhere, and when you think "garlic," you may well think "GarlicZoom!" shortly thereafter. Take it from a knife guy: As gadgets go, this thing's OK.
Posted by James Norton at March 10, 2008 10:34 PM
« Strip Club: cheeky or offensive? | Main | 5 common coffee mistakes »
Comments
Will GarlicZoom make the touch-stainless-steel-to- remove-garlic-odors debate irrelevant?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6473350
Posted by: RH at March 11, 2008 5:14 PM
Won't a blender do the same thing? I eat TV dinners.
Posted by: Helm Matthews at March 12, 2008 11:48 AM
Advantages of GarlicZoom over a blender:
1. Much easier to rinse clean.
2. Size of device is far more suited to size of garlic.
3. No cat-scaring WHIRRRRR associated with electric appliances.
4. Gentler / smaller blade allows for more user input into the final size of the garlic bits.
That said, yeah, it's pretty much like a tiny plastic blender.
Posted by: James Norton at March 12, 2008 11:53 AM
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