The product we used:
The Swiss Army Knife of Potato Salad
Potato lovers out there, we at Globalkitchen Japan know that we haven’t been good to you. We almost never talk spuds, and when we do, it’s usually about sweet spuds, rather than the tried and true savory ones you likely eat on a regular basis.
But Japan loves potatoes, too. We swear.
In fact, our friends at Nonoji love potatoes so much that they made a potato masher that’s specially designed for preparing potato salad, a popular side-dish for family restaurant meals, convenience store bentos, and even the occasional main carbohydrate for home cooked meals. Their masher can do everything: mix, gather, scoop, and serve. No need to whip out a fork or other more specialized tool for the job. It’s also designed to whisk and strain food, making it a kind of Swiss army knife for all your potato salad needs. The cherry on top? The masher is good for cleaning out the last bits of food from bowls, and the masher is easy to clean when dinner is over.
Let’s take a closer look at the masher. Later, we’ll give our impression of this multi-talented masher (spoiler: we like it but we believe the name is confusing).
Mix with ease
The masher has 4 parallel wires with a spring-like structure. It resembles a typical whisk, making it excellent at mixing. Potatoes can be sticky, but the wires don’t give much surface area for potatoes to stick to, allowing you to mix without fuss.
Gather and Serve
The spring-like structure also allows it to flatten out and collect ingredients in every part of your bowl or on your ladle without waste. Thanks to the spoon-like shape, not only can you collect, but you can easily serve your potato salad as well.
Whisk and Strain
While the Nonoji is designed primarily for potato mashing, the whisk and spoon-like design combine to make the Nonoji Potato Masher well-suited to whisking eggs or straining small amounts of boiled or fried foods.
Impressions
When you look at the abilities that the Nonoji combines–it can mix, gather, and serve potato salad, do some light whisking, and even strain food–and you consider how easy it is to clean once you’re finished, it’s easy to see why it won the Good Design award.
In our own experience, we found that it worked well for all of the aforementioned features. Just make sure your potatoes are a bit on the softer side or else you might have trouble breaking them up with the Nonoji. As you can tell from the pictures, it’s not really large enough to replace a dedicated strainer for boiled or fried food, but it can be used for any small straining jobs.
However, there is one job the Nonoji Potato Masher didn’t perform as well as we’d hoped: mashing. If you’re looking to make a big batch of mashed potatoes, not only is the Nonoji too small, but it’s also weakest when pushing down in a typical mashing motion (this allows it to scrape bowls clean quite well).
Really, the problem is more with the English name than its functionality.
If you want to mash potatoes, then skip the Nonoji potato masher. Confusing? Yes.
If you want a tool for making potato salad that can also work well as a whisk or small strainer, the Nonoji is a no-brainer.
From Japan, With Spud
Spud lovers, your prayers have been answered. Globalkitchen Japan has the last potato masher salad mixing spoon you’ll ever need. The potato masher salad industry will never be the same.
