What?
The Elgento potato peeler and salad spinner, (£33, Clever Boxes) is a motor-driven grating disc and vertically slotted cylinder. It centripetally abrades food surfaces and separates water from leaves
Why?
Potatoes don’t need jackets. This isn’t that kinda place
Well?
First of all, that brand name sounds like the self-appointed nickname of a narcissistic dictator, or Spanish beach resort. Either way it sounds ludicrous when attached to a potato peeler. Elgento? The Elgento potato peeler. There’s no point straining for classiness when your product literally sloughs the muddy skin off spuds. It’s huge – the size of a crouching toddler minus the head – and quite ugly. I throw some new potatoes into the basin. Organic ones, unscrubbed. (That’s what organic means, isn’t it? Just completely caked in shit. Some high-end veg boxes now deliver a cubic foot of worm-infested earth, in which you can rootle around for one or two tubers, spotted with authentic blight.) So, how does it peel (to treat me like you do)? It’s a bit like a blender with no blade, jumbling the potatoes all higgledy-piggledy (note to self: use this phrase more, it’s delightful). The spinning floor is grated, scratching the feet of the potatoes as they’re thrown around. The walls too have jagged panels, to rasp off their skin. The chamber is the type of sadistic room associated with Saw movies, but specially designed for veg. As the appliance whirls noisily, new potatoes leap like popping corn. I have to hold the top closed, feeling like the man who stands next to the machine that picks the National Lottery balls. Should I be wearing gloves and a keen sense of indignity? (I also tried with heftier King Edwards, and keeping a lid on those felt like drowning puppies.) After two minutes I have a look. I’ve invented a new dish! Patatas tombola. It consists of taters peeled so incompletely they resemble moulting dormice, over a disc clogged with mulchy skin bits. There’s no way to spin this – the device is bloody useless, and trebled my workload. The thing about Mussolini is, he made sure the potatoes were peeled properly.
Redeeming features?
The full name on the box is Elgento Potato Peeler & Salad Spinner, the second bit written in quite faint type. This is equivalent to semi-raising your hand in class, or talking dirty in a funny accent. Be more confident Elgento! It’s an OK salad spinner!
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Back in the Grotto of Ineptitude, with Mystic Meg. 1/5
