Planet Veggie

A spiralizer has been the must-have gadget for a while now and supermarkets have cottoned on to this trend by selling their own ready-spiralized vegetables for three times the price the veggie noodles would be if you made them yourself. I can see the attraction of the ready-spiralized veg though – no getting any gadgets out, no cleaning up afterwards and if you’ve got arthritis or something else that means your grip’s not great, then it’s the only option available (on the assumption you’re not rich enough to pay someone solely to come around and spiralize a couple of carrots for you while you doss about watching Loose Women on the telly).

Why spiralize vegetables? What’s wrong with chopping them like we did in the good old days (the ‘good old days’ being pre-2014)?  Spiralized vegetables are great for those on low-carb diets or for those who want to save calories by cutting down on pasta, as the noodles you can make from veg like courgette (courgetti) or carrots  (I don’t know what the official name is, so let’s call them carroodles) make a great alternative to spaghetti when topped with bolognese or other pasta sauce or just simply served as a salad with a dressing of your choice.

There are two types of spiralizer – a pencil-sharpener type where you stick your veg in and twist, and the more hi-tech one such as the one Mueller sent me to review: the Mueller Spiral Pro 4 Blade Spiralizer which contains all manner of bits and blades but which is a lot easier to put together and use than it looks.

Appearance 

The first thing you notice about this spiralizer is its compactness – everything is stored neatly inside, making it easy to store in a cupboard. As someone who has food processor blades hanging around in drawers and cupboards for food processors she no longer owns, this is great. Things getting ‘orphaned’ is a bugbear of mine – I can’t bear to look for my stick blender and find the blender bit isn’t with the stick bit or the body of my handheld electric whisk is nowhere near the whisks. It drives me mad, it really does but no bits can go missing from this (unless you try really hard) – even the blades are stored neatly in the side.

What you get

The spiralizer comprises the main unit which – as mentioned above – also acts as a storage box. There’s also four blades of varying thickness – a straight blade, an angel hair blade, a shredding blade and a chipping blade and you can tell which blade is which by a little diagram on the blade itself. The cover acts as a food tray but I found the courgetti didn’t want to fall out of the blade neatly into it, so I just put a bowl underneath instead which meant one fewer thing to wash up. It also comes with a stick pin holder for use when making spiral chips from potatoes and the instructions for this and for putting the spiralizer together in the first place are on the accompanied instruction leaflet.

Ease of assembly and use

I put off using this for ages – months, in fact. I thought it looked complicated to put together and that there’d be too many bits to clean up afterwards. But it all slots together easily and it even locks so it’s not suddenly going to fall apart half way through making your courgetti or caroodles.

At the risk of looking like a dunce, I didn’t notice the pin holder on the blade (it’s just above the courgette in the photo above) and only stuck my courgette onto the spiky bit that’s attached to the handle. My frustration grew as the courgette kept falling off and although the instructions actually say ‘affix food centrally on pin holder’, I thought the spiky bit on the handle was the pin holder – it’s not – there’s a little pin on the blade that you also need to stick your food on. Then it stays nicely attached at both ends while you turn the handle with one hand, while supposedly holding on to the pusher with the other hand. I say ‘supposedly’ as, in practice, I wasn’t able to do this because the suction feet didn’t have any suction for me and kept slipping on the worktop. Once I’d got a bit of the way down the courgette though, I was able to hold the pusher and the front of the unit with one hand and get some pressure behind it that way, albeit in a hand-achingly way. The next time I used the spiralizer, I tried on a smoother surface but the feet still wouldn’t stick and stay in place and that did make it slightly difficult to get going at first.

Still, I got there in the end and was surprised to see one courgette makes a huge bowl of noodles (sorry, courgetti), which I had for lunch with my smoky vegan garlic mushroom pate.

Cleaning 

Cleaning is probably the reason most kitchen gadgets remain unused – it’s certainly the reason I no longer use my juicer – but this spiralizer is easy to clean; just unattach the bits (which are as easy to unattach as they are to attach in the first place) and rinse under the tap or put in the dishwasher. There was minimal courgette juice on the main unit which I just wiped off with a bit of kitchen roll.

Summary 

The Mueller Spiral Pro 4 Blade Spiralizer is easy to use, easy to clean and easy to store. The only downside is the lack of suction in the feet, which meant it wouldn’t stay put but I’m now hooked on courgetti so I’m going to keep using it and if you want one, you can buy one on Amazon.

Disclaimer: I received the spiralizer at a discount but under no obligation to say nice things about it. Therefore, all opinions are my own and I only recommend products I’m happy with and that I use myself. The links to the spiralizer are affiliate links and I’ll receive a small commission if you buy the product after clicking on them which helps pay my hosting fees and beer and cat food and stuff.