(a post for jenn schiffer's microblogvember)
there's two basic kinds of these things: wire slicers and cheese planes. cheese is a very important substance to me, so I have used each of them more times than I care to count.
cheese planes are comically bad. every time I use one, I get about an inch of a perfectly flat cut, followed by the plane wandering either up or down (usually up). and if I manage to get all the way to the other side of the block of cheese without screwing it up, it always breaks out and leaves a nice chin that I wanted to be part of the next slice of cheese I was going to cut.
wire slicers are mostly Fine, I Guess except for three things:
- the wire never sits flush on the counter, so you get slices with chins the same way you do with cheese planes.
- cleaning and drying them1 is a royal pain.
- the wire is fragile and I've lost a handful of wire slicers to the wire either pulling out of the little retention clip on the side or just rusting through and breaking.
years ago I gave up on getting perfect slices of cheese, and just resigned myself to using a knife and learning to put up with the imperfection.
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maybe it's just because I haven't bought one in like a decade but I don't think I've ever owned one that had a stainless steel wire; the body tends not to rust up if you don't dry it, but the wire always has.
