Today’s Kitchen Tool Tuesday is a Paderno Spiral Vegetable Noodle Maker , more formally known as the Paderno World Cuisine Tri-Blade Plastic Spiral Vegetable. That is a mouthful (literally! hardee har har). FYI There are lots of great user submitted pics on the noodle maker’s Amazon page.

I finally ordered this kitchen toy to liven up my meals as it looked like a way to easily convert veggies into a fun form. I was pretty dubious and saw people using them online and thought I could just use a potato peeler to ‘peel’ noodles off of the turnips (which turned out to be an utter fail). Also, I loved pasta. I use a lot of substitutes (shirataki noodles, spaghetti squash, etc) so anything that is similar to pasta is great in my book.



So far three separate vegetables have become victims to this device: turnips, carrots and yellow squash.

Bottom line? THIS THING IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It turned my veggies into awesome long curly noodles of cuteness!

Tips:

If using a ‘squat’ vegetable like a turnip, shove it into the spikes on the right and using the handle PULL the vegetable into the blade while turning the back spinner.

Don’t be afraid to PUSH, hence why there are suction cups on the bottom of this thing.

If using a long vegetable, like a carrot, shove one end of the carrot into the spikes on the right and the other end into a protruding metal circle that cores the vegetable.

For long narrow veggies like the carrot, you may need to re adjust so the corer remains central.

Cool features of this gadget:

Suction cups on the ‘feet’ so it stays put and they have little tabs on them to ‘pop’ off the surface (someone else had to point that out to me haha)

Has three separate attachments for thin noodles, medium noodles, and straight on ‘slice’ (which I could technically just use my mandoline for). The device is set up to store all three blades with it so they don’t go magically missing (like all the parts for my food processor!!)

If done right, it makes suuuuuuuuper long noodles which are super fun for kids (ok and grown ups)

Tool is very easy to use and safe for children over age 5 (in my opinion) to assist in food preparation

Downsides:

I wish the legs were a little higher so I could easily put a bowl under it to catch the noodles. Yeah yeah I COULD use a plate but I prefer to work with bowls.

The third blade of just ‘slice’ is kind of lame because I already have my amazing mandoline so this is a wash.

It would be cool if it came in neon pink.

It breaks down into separate pieces that make it fairly easy to clean. I do not recommend trying to clean the blade with a regular sponge; get a scrub brush to help brush out any bits caught in the balde(s). Aside from that, easy to clean/rinse off.

I’ll post how I prepared the carrot/turnip noodles later this week. Below is a pic of the yellow squash noodles (which I microwaved for about 2 minutes on High to soften).