Thursday, June 30, 2011

Spirooli Review

I bought a Spirooli last week.  As I mentioned when I reviewed my Joyce Chen spiral slicer, it had a few issues in that the "angel hair pasta" pieces didn't always separate completely.

When I was in Martha's Vineyard, we used the Spirooli to make pasta with marinara sauce.  I was really impressed by the noodles it created.  They are considerably thicker noodles - more like spaghetti, but the noodles cut very cleanly and evenly.

Both machines basically do the same thing, but if you're not in need of really tiny noodles, you'll probably be really pleased with the performance of the Spirooli.

To give you a little review of how the Spirooli works, here are a couple pictures of cucumber "noodles" being made.

As you can see, unlike the Joyce Chen that allows a maximum 3 inch long piece of vegetable to be used in the machine, the Spirooli allows for a much longer piece of vegetable to be used.   In fact, for this cucumber, we only needed to slice off the ends to make sure that they were both parallel to each other so they would work in the machine.


Here is a picture once some of the "noodles" have been made so you can see how they come out of the machine.  One thing I learned is it's very important that you turn the crank with your right hand and also hold tight to the lever with your left hand and use the left hand lever to push the vegetable forward into the slicer.

Once entire vegetable is spiralized, there'll be a little core left over with about 1/4 inch of vegetable left at the end.  It sort of looks like a really long skinny mushroom.  You can save this for juicing or just snack on it while you're preparing your raw meal:


Here's a picture of the bowl of finished Spirooli Zucchini Pasta.  Some of the pasta noodles were close to 6 feet long!  I ran a knife across the diameter of the bowl just to shorten some of the noodles.  I think I'd have a tough time twirling 6 feet of noodles around a fork!


Compare that with the bowl of Joyce Chen Pasta below.  You can really see the difference in noodle size.  If you look closely, you'll also see that some of the Joyce Chen noodles have not completely separated from each other.  A lot of the noodles are thick perforated pieces, but they are not really "noodles"

We served the Spirooli zucchini noodles with homemade pesto sauce.  I was really happy to discover that Trader Joes had raw pine nuts back in stock (at a reasonable price), and I found organic basil at Wal-mart (of all places!)


These noodles were a huge hit!   I eat zucchini noodles pretty regularly, so I'm excited that I can have these now.  I will probably alternate with the Joyce Chen from time to time for variety.

After my raw food gathering on Saturday my friend sent me a link to this video on the Lurch Dyskus slicer.  I had never heard of it, but I think I might have to buy it!! It's not too pricey and it does so much!  Look at those really cute wavy zucchini pasta pieces it makes - not noodles but something that really looks like a fancy shaped pasta, about the size of Ziti.  That'd be nice with pesto sauce or in a pasta salad ... !



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