What?
The Mix & Mist salad sprayer (£16, amazon.co.uk) is a double-nozzle pump, fed by a bi-compartmental chamber. Synthesises oil and vinegar under pressure into mist.
Why?
Dress for the salad you want, not the salad you have.
Well?
I’m trying to think fairly about the aspirational product before me, but the box is making it hard. For a start, it has the words “clean eating” printed right on the front, which annoys me irrationally, much like talking to someone sitting on a medicine ball. “Eating clean is not about cutting calories, it’s about cutting out processed food,” the box reads. “Preparing real food, with wholesome, unadulterated ingredients, from scratch.” So … cooking. You’re talking about cooking.
There are other confusing aspects to the Mix & Mist from Taylor’s Eye Witness. Taylor’s Eye Witness is a strange name for a cookware company – calling to mind a violent crime in a menswear department – but it has been around since “the early part of the 19th century”. Sounds a bit vague. “Control the mix on the fly at the twist of the wrist” doesn’t sound very 19th century. (Frankly, it sounds like something I would write.)
It’s a good idea, though, having chambers for olive oil and balsamic vinegar that let you mist a bespoke combo, and the design does have elegance. There are settings for either oil or vinegar, half and half and any ratio you like, which are selected by turning the gauge on the device’s neck. When would you use the vinegar-only setting? “Homemade chips”, according to the blurb. (Anyone administering a mist of balsamic vinegar to homemade chips is asking for a punch in the corduroys.)
Sadly, in practice, the Mix & Mist serves up nothing but problems. It categorically produces a squirt, rather than mist. Initially, I couldn’t work up enough pressure in the 50/50 setting and ended up getting all oil and no vinegar. I had to work the pump maniacally even to get to that point, as if I were wielding a Super Soaker 0.0001 or spraying the kitchen for greenfly. When I turned the device upright to give the pumps some depth of liquid to draw from, I jetted grease over my keyboard, walls and ceiling. It has been a week since I removed this uselessness from my kitchen mix. Gone – and definitely not mist.
Redeeming features?
All the settings work equally well, which is not at all.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Both chambers can do one. 2/5
