The vintage gadget I didn’t expect to love: that makes vegetables crunchy and deliciously dippable

Despite our shared last name, my grandmother hated cooking. She was infamous in our family for using her oven as a cabinet for chips and sliced ​​bread. And yet, when I helped clean out the kitchen after his death, I found dozens of mid-century kitchen utensils that I couldn’t hope to name. An eight-pronged fork. An Iron Maiden the size of an egg. A terrifying vessel shaped like the decapitated head of a flirtatious, winking cat.

The most intriguing of these was a wavy stainless steel blade with a bakelite handle. It looked like a funhouse guillotine.

“It’s a crease cutter“, my mother scoffed.

So yes: a funhouse guillotine.

At the time, I viewed crinkle cutting largely as a retro affectation or a patronizing method of making vegetables tastier for kids. But the benefits of a crease cutter aren’t limited to aesthetics. The crinkle cut maximizes surface area, improving texture, crunch and condiment absorption for all kinds of foods: fries, carrots, pickles and more.

Now I recognize the crinkle cut as the domain of serious cooks and eaters. Once you experience the smuggling power of a crinkle carrot, you’ll never want to put in a boring carrot again, smooth carrot stick on a relish tray.

The Life-Changing Magic of the Crinkle Cup

When thinking about when to cut pleats, think like an engineer. There’s a reason you see corrugated metal on roofs and pole barns, as well as corrugated cardboard in shipping materials. Corrugations make materials stronger and more rigid. Crinkled foods can also improve their crunch, stiffness and stickiness.

Because of its surface-increasing powers, crinkle cutting is especially beneficial for roasted or fried foods, where you want to maximize crispness and crunch. I’ve used mine for cottage fries, French fries, thick-cut Saratoga chips, and even roasted and grilled potato slices. The ridges also provide more pockets for spices and sauces, enhancing flavor and texture.

But the benefits go beyond roasted and fried foods. The crinkle cut can increase the crunch (and visual interest) of a giardiniera or Mexican escabeche. It can also give raw or slippery fruits and vegetables more grip: a crumpled pickle chip is less likely to slide off your burger between bites; a crumpled slice of banana is less likely to ooze out of your Elvis-style peanut butter sandwich.

I even came to the crinkle cut purely for the aesthetic appeal. Does this make food look like it was teleported from the atomic age? Of course. But we are now in a post-modernist kitchen: a little kitsch is good. I recommend slicing hard-boiled eggs with a cookie cutter for especially pretty deviled eggs, or adding wavy slices of carrots and cucumbers to a Midwestern pasta salad topped with mayonnaise.

Will it crease?

The answer to the question “Will it be wrinkled?” is usually “Yes”. The safeguards are quite clear. You shouldn’t use a cookie cutter to skin a delicate fish or debone a chicken (unless the chicken has really weird bones).

But some exceptions are less obvious. I don’t recommend cutting most alliums by crinkling: a crinkle cutter will wreak havoc on the cell walls of garlic and onions, releasing more of their pungent, sulfur-flavored compounds. I also avoid cutting delicate foods like tomatoes, as the knife is more likely to crush them than slice them.

Wrinkled knives, like serrated knives, become dull over time and can be especially difficult to sharpen at home. This means I don’t pull out my cutter for any task that requires paper-thin slices or a razor-sharp blade.

My vintage funhouse guillotine isn’t the only way to wrinkle, of course. Wavy blades are available for many mandolins and food processors, and they can help achieve thinner, more uniform slices. But I favor the handheld varieties for a reason: They’re more versatile, especially if you want to use your cookie cutter for more decorative work or garnishes. How else could one make the intricate cuts needed to make webbed carrot legs for a squash goose?

I don’t know if my grandmother ever made goose with squash. I’m not at all sure she used the crinkle cutter (I know she used the terrifying cat containers). But I am grateful to him for the introduction. We can all benefit from the texture-boosting capabilities of the crinkle cutter. But we can also benefit from its aesthetic reminder: we should all keep playing with our food.