[Sca-cooks] Electric knives

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Bill Fisher:
>I stated before I don't like rotary bladed deli slicers, they do weird
>things to the
>meat because it pushes and pulls it in a circle while it cuts.  It ruins the
>texture of the meat and opens up the fibers and lets out more juices.
>
>If you don't have juices in your roasts, what can I say....

I've worked with rotary slicers pretty extensively, and everything 
you say about them is true, when they're dull and need sharpening. 
One could argue that the rotary nature of the cut puts stresses on 
the food and tends to tear it, but one could counter that by saying 
this is minimized by a sharp blade, and it's just another cutting 
edge being drawn in a stroke across the food.

The Krupps machine, which has a sort of snaggle-toothed edge that 
scares me a little, is not necessarily something I'd recommend in the 
same breath as the more heavy-duty machines. I actually own one, but 
haven't used it much. I think what concerns me most about it (does 
Krupps make more than one model?) is a tendency to flex a little 
under stress and weight, since some of the parts are plastic. As I 
say, it scares me a little.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04