There’s something reassuring about buying a cutting tool and immediately discovering that yes, the manufacturer definitely remembered the cutting part.
These blades are sharp.
Really sharp.
I discovered this through extensive scientific analysis involving a vegetable chopper, my thumb, and the sudden realization that I was one stupid movement away from considerably changing the way I count to ten.
So let’s begin this review with a warning:
Watch your damn fingers.
That little adventure aside, this vegetable chopper has turned out to be one of those kitchen gadgets that looks completely unnecessary until you own one. Then suddenly you’re wondering why you’ve spent your entire adult life standing over a cutting board chopping onions like some sort of medieval peasant.
Do I Know How to Use a Knife? Yes.
Before somebody starts pounding out an angry comment about how a decent chef’s knife can accomplish the same thing, let me save you the trouble.
I know.
I’ve used knives for years.
Chopping vegetables isn’t particularly difficult. It’s just tedious, especially when you’re trying to make a pile of reasonably uniform pieces instead of producing an assortment ranging from “finely diced” to “apparently I got bored halfway through.”
With this thing, you put the vegetable where it needs to go and push down the lever.
CHUNK.
Vegetable chopped.
That’s about it.
There isn’t a touchscreen. It doesn’t need Wi-Fi. Nobody wants you to download the Vegetable Chopper Companion App.
You just push the damn thing down.
I respect that.
Potatoes Are Where This Thing Really Shines
Slicing potatoes is one of those jobs that isn’t hard enough to complain about but is annoying enough that you secretly don’t want to do it.
This chopper makes it ridiculously easy.
Instead of standing there slicing potato after potato and trying to maintain roughly the same thickness, the vegetable cutter does the repetitive work for you.
That’s especially nice when you’re preparing a bunch of them.
And honestly, that’s the whole reason gadgets like this should exist.
If you’re going to take up space in my kitchen, you had better save me time or make the job noticeably easier. Otherwise you’re just another piece of plastic I’ll eventually discover in a cabinet while looking for the damn cheese grater.
This thing actually earns its keep.
Chopping an Onion Is Almost Comically Easy
Onions might be even better.
Get the onion ready, put it over the chopping blades, push down the lever and there you go.
Chopped onion.
Something that normally requires a cutting board, knife, repeated chopping, scraping everything together and chopping it again has essentially been reduced to operating a vegetable guillotine.
And I mean that affectionately.
There’s also something strangely satisfying about pushing the lever down and watching the whole thing happen at once.
THUNK.
Congratulations. Your onion has been dealt with.
Move along.
It Actually Saves Enough Time to Be Worth Cleaning
This is where a lot of kitchen gadgets completely screw themselves.
Saving me three minutes while cooking doesn’t mean anything if I have to spend fifteen minutes afterward with a toothbrush trying to remove half an onion from seventeen tiny plastic crevices.
At that point, I’ll just use the knife.
Fortunately, cleanup on ours really isn’t bad.
The pieces come apart well enough to get everything cleaned up, and we haven’t found ourselves avoiding the chopper simply because we don’t want to wash the bastard afterward.
That’s important.
There are all kinds of clever kitchen gadgets that work perfectly well but eventually stop getting used because pulling them out, assembling them, cleaning them and putting everything away takes longer than doing the job the old-fashioned way.
This isn’t one of them.
We actually use it.
For a kitchen gadget, that’s about the highest compliment I can give.
Holy Shit, Those Blades Are Sharp
And now we arrive back at my thumb.
Being sharp is obviously a good quality for a vegetable chopper.
You don’t want blades that gently negotiate with the potato. You want something that cuts through the damn thing.
These do.
Unfortunately, potatoes and thumbs apparently have similar opinions about being sliced by sharp pieces of stainless steel.
That’s why I would strongly recommend treating the blades with considerably more respect than I initially did.
Don’t reach around them carelessly. Don’t absentmindedly grab them while cleaning. Don’t look at the little cutting squares and think, I wonder how sharp these really are?
They’re sharp.
Mystery solved.
That’s not really a criticism of the product. Hell, it’s practically praise. I bought something designed to cut food and discovered that it is extremely enthusiastic about its job.
Just remember that you are technically food too.
Is It Better Than a Good Kitchen Knife?
Depends.
A good knife is still more versatile. It takes up less room. There are plenty of little jobs where grabbing a knife remains faster than pulling this thing out.
But that’s not really the point.
When you’re preparing enough vegetables that you’re going to be standing there chopping and slicing for a while, this thing starts making a lot more sense.
It turns repetitive cutting into a mechanical operation.
Potato.
CHUNK.
Another potato.
CHUNK.
Onion.
THUNK.
Thumb.
NO.
Once you get into a rhythm, you can get through food surprisingly quickly.
That’s when this stops feeling like another stupid kitchen gadget and starts feeling like something genuinely useful.
What Don’t We Like?
Honestly, not much.
Any multi-piece kitchen gadget is going to occupy more cabinet space than a knife, and you’ve obviously got more pieces to keep track of.
And those sharp blades deserve some thought when you’re storing them. This isn’t something I’d casually throw into a drawer and then blindly rummage through later looking for something else.
That’s less of a design complaint than a general desire to finish life with approximately the same number of fingers I started with.
Otherwise, ours has been simple.
It chops well.
It slices well.
It cleans up easily enough.
And most importantly, it performs jobs we actually do often enough that the thing hasn’t been banished to the dark corner of the kitchen containing all the other gadgets we were convinced would change our lives.
Should You Buy This Crap?
Yeah, actually.
If you regularly chop onions, slice potatoes, or prep a decent amount of vegetables, this is exactly the sort of stupidly simple kitchen gadget that can make cooking noticeably less annoying.
It’s not going to revolutionize food preparation.
It’s not going to turn you into a chef.
It’s not going to repair your marriage, improve your credit score, or finally convince your family that loading the dishwasher isn’t an advanced technical skill.
It just makes chopping vegetables easier.
And sometimes that’s exactly what a good product should do.
It solves a simple problem without introducing six new ones.
We’ve found ours easy to use, easy enough to clean, genuinely useful for potatoes and onions, and sharp enough to perform its intended job extremely well.
Possibly a little too well, according to my thumb.
The Bottom Line
A kitchen gadget earns my recommendation when we continue using it after the novelty wears off.
This one has.
If I need to chop an onion or work through a bunch of potatoes, I’m reaching for this thing instead of voluntarily standing at the cutting board pretending I enjoy repetitive knife work.
Just respect the blades.
Your vegetables won’t stand a chance.
Neither will your thumb.
A Quick Note About the Brand
The vegetable chopper we own and tested is branded Goldtree. That version no longer appears to be readily available through its original Amazon listing, so our purchase links lead to the currently available IPOVIPO version.
We have not found evidence that Goldtree was purchased by IPOVIPO. However, the IPOVIPO chopper appears to use the same underlying design as ours. The body, plastic coloring, blade system and individual components appear identical, right down to the numbers molded into the parts.
This is likely a private-label manufacturing situation, where the same factory-made product is sold by multiple companies under different brand names. My father used to repair machines in factories that made identical products for competing labels, so this arrangement is neither unusual nor especially mysterious.
To be completely accurate, this review covers our experience with the Goldtree-branded version. The links point to the currently available IPOVIPO model, which appears mechanically identical, but we have not purchased a second unit and disassembled both of them in the kitchen like an extremely low-budget episode of CSI: Vegetable Chopper.
