Dynamic Dynacube Veg Slicer Review
One of the big issues I remember from running a kitchen in a hotel always used to be consistency. I always believed that no matter what you were preparing, what ingredients you were using, no matter how expensive and precise or inexpensive and rustic the food was, the key to a successful catering operation is to work out what you want to do, fine tune how you are going to do, and stick to it.
Repeat it over and over again until it is clockwork, until it’s done without thinking. And then keep it consistent. Put systems in place to make it straight forward for people to follow.
However it was a real struggle.
Something as Simple as Chopping Food
One key area that would throw up irregularities would be something as simple as chopping food. Dicing, slicing, cutting and chopping. You could show a trainee chef how you want something cut once, twice, maybe three, four or five times. And they would get it. Most of the time.
There were however always those times that they wouldn’t get it. The time things went a little “Off Piste”. Maybe the chef had had a late night and wasn’t concentrating as much. Maybe he wanted to rush through his jobs and get finished a little earlier as they were going out. Maybe they were too busy thinking about which film to see at the cinema that night with their friends to notice something as important as cutting an onion or dicing a tomato to the size that I had asked them to.
And I still have flashbacks of the number of blue plasters being distributed at times, along with the cry of “Just a little nick chef, no problem” from the blood dripping commis chef trying desperately to get back to work, hoping the rest of the team hadn’t noticed their little mis-hap.
Well there is an answer. There is a solution. A tool that guarantees you the same result every time it’s used. A tool that can be used to ensure consistency. A machine so simple in its use that it understates just how cleverly it has been manufactured.
The Dynamic Dynacube
The Dynacube is a device which is safe to use and in a head to head contest will beat the best of chefs for hourly production rate of consistently chopped ingredients. It is a rather “Alien spaceship” lookalike piece of equipment from Dynamic which is also known nationwide as the orange one!
The Dynacube was first introduced to me a year or so ago and I have to be truthful and say we didn’t hit it off together straight away. I thought it was an odd looking thing, funny shaped, bizarre contraption. I also still had memories of my ex head chefs drilling into me:
However, Things Have Changed..
I can hand on heart say that this is a fantastic piece of kit. And as a method of providing consistency, less wastage and time saving, it really is up there as one of the best. To confirm, that's:
- More consistent than chopping by hand
- Less waste from your ingredients
- Time saved in the kitchen
Not bad, hey?
The shape is a little odd, I'll grant you that. However once you turn the legs back in on itself, in regards to storage it takes up very little space. It’s also incredibly easy to clean.
How To Use the Dynacube?
It is a bizarre contraption, however only in the sense that Dynamic have created a very complex, clever machine and made it one of the most user friendly pieces of kit anyone in the kitchen will ever use. It really is so so simple. You drop the whole food in, turn the handle and it all gets diced beautifully. Done.
Of course the words of advice regarding not using machinery were referring to a Robot Coupe electric food processor. And the reasoning was very justified. The Robot Coupe is awesome at what it does, but as you know, a shallot or onion chopped in a food processor gets badly cut, bruised, crushed and generally not treated with the respect that it should.
However, the Dynacube has one major positive over the food processor. It’s not electric. It’s manual. And so the element of crushing and battering the food does not come into play. This is also enhanced by the fact that the dynacube blades (3 are used to dice) are all moving blades, ensuring a very clean cut, resulting in a brilliantly diced piece of food at the end of it.
What Can The Dynacube Slice?
Pretty much anything. Really! Even soft foods such as tomatoes and kiwi fruit are all treated with the same respect and cut very surgically, ensuring that when you want diced kiwi, you get diced kiwi. You don’t get the first layer diced and then the rest sort of diced or chopped or crushed or ruined.
Onions, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, potatoes, kiwis, pineapples and apples are just some of the foods that will go through this machine will no problem.
The way it works is you have different size blade sets (which you can buy separately). 7x7mm, 8.5x8.5mm, 10x10mm, 14x14mm and 17x17mm, depending on how big diced foods you want.
It will also slice and create batons depending how you fit the blades. Adding to its versatility.
Another major positive I think is the price point. At less than half the cost of the average food processor this machine would be very high on my wish list as a chef.
And with labour saving, wastage reduction and improved safety features all adding to the benefits, I would expect most of my managers to be happy to invest in this every time.
Watch the video below to see the Dynacube in action: