Chopping vegetables can be therapeutic for some home cooks. For others, it’s a monotonous chore that must be endured. Whether it’s chopping up veggies for chicken noodle soup, a big pan of roasted vegetables, or a healthy leafy green salad, it can take a lot of time. And, if you’re chopping onions, it can bring on a lot of tears.
Last year, a kitchen tool that users called “perfect” was all the rage on social media and in home kitchens—a chopper that made quick and non-teary work of vegetable prep. From the beginning, we were impressed with the Mueller Austria vegetable chopper, a tool with a base container, a lid with interchangeable blades, and eight different blades to chop, grate, and slice.
Simply put the food on top of your chosen blade, push the lid of the container down, and it cuts it to your liking in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it with a knife. The cut veggies fall neatly into the container. Customers rave about its ability to chop an entire onion in five seconds, and how easy it is to wash the chopper by hand or in the dishwasher.
The Mueller chopper is normally priced around $30 on Amazon, which may be worth it for how much time it saves and how much easier it makes meal prep. But it’s still a nice chunk of change, even when it goes on sale. Thankfully, Aldi brought back a copycat version of the chopper in its Aldi Finds aisle this week—and it’s just $9.99.
Aldi’s Crofton Food Chopper Is Back
Crofton is Aldi’s own brand of kitchen items, and it frequently has similar versions of popular kitchen goods, such as Lodge cast iron skillets, Stanley tumblers, and even Crock Pot slow cookers. The Crofton items are wildly popular and often sell out within a few days, if not hours. And once they’re gone, they rarely make a return in the same season.
Allrecipes / Aldi
The Crofton Food Chopper was last spotted in Aldi last January, and is hitting store shelves once again on Jan. 7 as one of the weekly Aldi Finds. According to the website, the tool is “available while quantities last.”
The chopper comes in blue, green, and white, and includes a dicing blade (like the one that can chop an onion in five seconds), a blade that spiralizes or shreds fruits and veggies, and another blade that creates long, thin sheets. It also comes with a cleaning tool, and has a container that holds just over five cups of veggies.
Considering how useful this $10 gadget is, it’s bound to fly off of shelves. So make plans to get to Aldi this week and head straight for that “Aisle of Shame.”
