![]() ![]() (“They don’t have any say!” a top editor there insisted to me.) Nearly 150,000 people follow OXO on Instagram, where the company’s not-particularly-exciting photos of neatly organized pantries full of OXO Pop storage containers garner comments like “They keep food so fresh and look amazing!” Its products also inspire fierce devotion among chefs and culinary experts. OXO rules America’s Test Kitchen picks, too, to the point it makes readers suspicious ATK is in cahoots with the brand. OXO is so dominant in the kitchen-gadget space that the consumer-recommendation site Wirecutter features a blog post simply listing the 42 OXO products that top its various category rankings. 1 kitchen gadget company in market share, according to market research firm the NPD Group. These days, OXO-pronounced “ox-oh,” not “oh-ex-oh”-is the No. The near-fanatical devotion the company inspires three decades later is a little harder. And it’s succeeded, without ever substantially changing its iconic look-so iconic that the company’s initial vegetable peeler, with its “Good Grips” handle, is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. OXO brought universal design into the mainstream: Its products were meant to be welcoming, accessible, and easy to use for customers of differing abilities and confidence levels. Founded in 1990, it was the brainchild of a housewares mogul who was inspired to create a new kind of product (legend has it) by the struggles of his arthritic wife to peel an apple. If you’ve ever stocked a first apartment’s kitchen, or searched the internet for the perfect measuring cup, or asked a friend “Why is your ice-cream scoop better than mine?,” you know OXO. Maybe not, but don’t tell that to the people who love OXO. OXO, with its embrace of dutiful, functional design and every-cook utility, certainly wasn’t Tiffany. But to see this humble prototype-Frankenstein’d out of a child’s toy top and some hand-carved plastic, dull with age-swaddled inside a gorgeous Tiffany box made me laugh. Next, I asked five testers with varying.OXO revolutionized the salad spinner, to be sure. ![]() Then, since nobody slices up paper for dinner, I used the newly honed knives to slice tomatoes, knowing that sharp knives would glide through tough tomato skin, while dull ones would squash it, making oozing slices. I assigned one knife to each rod and started to hone.īefore honing and again after every few swipes, I tried to slice paper to help me gauge whether the blades' sharpness had improved. This accelerated the typical effects of much longer use on more forgiving wood or plastic boards. I dulled the cutting edges of nine new chef's knives on that hard glass cutting board by chopping until the blade failed to cut smoothly through paper. You get a feel for it after several minutes' practice. Happily, I discovered that honing is not that scary or difficult. While you could hone in the air, like my holiday host, we find this less reliable because you have two moving pieces, which makes it harder to keep a consistent angle. The test kitchen's preferred technique is to plant the tip of the rod on a cutting board, hold it straight, and slide the knife from heel to tip down each side of the rod at about a 15-degree angle, maintaining light, consistent pressure. Since I'd never used a honing rod, I read the instructions (though some arrived without any) and practiced. Did these tools all perform the same function? I included some of every type to find out. When I researched “honing rods,” “honing steels,” “sharpening steels,” and “sharpening rods,” I found that there was no industry consistency, with some sources insisting that these were different tools and others using the terms interchangeably. To this honing novice, everything about this tool was confusing, starting with the terminology. ![]() ![]() To test them, I bought nine copies of our favorite chef's knife, a sheaf of copy paper, dozens of tomatoes, and a glass cutting board (the fastest way to dull any knife) and headed to the kitchen. The most unusual model was a handle with two interchangeable rods-one diamond-coated steel, the other ceramic. Their surfaces varied, ranging from smooth to ridged to a combination of textures. The rods themselves ranged from 8 to 12 inches long and were made of steel, ceramic, or diamond-coated steel. All had the same basic design, a sticklike rod with a handle on one end. It sure looks impressive, but I've always secretly wondered: Does that really sharpen a knife? We've all sat at holiday tables watching our host put on a show before carving the roast, slashing a knife in the air, back and forth, against a honing rod-swish, swish, swish. ![]()
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