5 Fruit Kitchen Gadgets Tested by Design Expert | Well Equipped | Epicurious

okay someone's successful i'm dan and i've been designing kitchen gadgets for 40 years i'm going to test some fruit gadgets and see if i can find a way to make them better so basically what you're doing is screwing the tube down i think i would exaggerate that curve a bit put some holes in here these are the products i am going to test to stop a banana filler watermelon slicer cocoa taps coconut tapper citrus sprayer strawberry slicer [Music] the stopper banana corer its purpose in life is the car out the middle of a banana so you can fill it with something delicious which probably means something more fattening than the banana let's test its effectiveness there is a core plunger it looks like the metal part will take out the core let's place the banana it doesn't exactly want to place perfectly let me give it a tighter squeeze and a plunge and let's see what we get okay i was in i'm out i didn't get the core i did put poke hole in so let me see if i can finagle some way to get the core out of here oh twisting it seems to uh to help a bit okay somewhat successful open my hershey's syrup and start pouring in slowly let it drizzle down not gonna let that go to waste get ready to be sticky when you do this and yeah we've got a chocolate filled banana but it is looking and tasting okay let's try doing the same thing using just a straight metal straw [Music] in terms of effectiveness on a one to five scale i would give this a two the real weak link in the system is the fact that the metal tube will plunge but there's really no way to get that core out now let's try the left-handed oil test by making my left hand slippery it's going to highlight any deficiencies in the design and areas for improvement i will squeeze with my right hand and plunge with my left hand plunge plunge plunge twist and i came out empty once again yeah that's a problem so i would say lefty or righty which this still has the same weak link in the system is that the inside of the banana does not want to come out with this tube in terms of usability i would give it a two it's a cord and to pull out and hold the metal part and pull out the red plunger takes a little bit of juggling of pieces let's think about a redesign so you have some geometric problems trying to get a straight tube into a curved banana and you may just have to wrestle with that i don't know how to solve that one thing that could possibly be done is to create an internal thread so basically what you're doing is screwing the tube down again i'm going to just quickly draw the tube there was a way to turn this into a screw mechanism we'd be a lot more successful at pulling out the car these threads would grab onto it as the banana is being pulled out or the core of the banana is being pulled out i would give that a shot because there's nothing worse than trying to put a hole in banana and you can't do it as for the handle of banana no complaints about that who doesn't like grabbing a small banana as for a buy rating i would give the the stopper banana cora a one out of five problem is it didn't want to pull the core out of the banana which you would think is important bananas deserve more care and understanding watermelon slicer its purpose in life is to cut 12 equal slices of watermelon so this is not the largest watermelon i've ever seen but we'll give it a shot and now that took a little bit of work because i am making that many slices at once uh it looks pretty good when it opens up you have to fight over who gets the tube i guess in the middle but that wasn't terrible that actually worked pretty well it did not cut all the way through but i think that was my technique there we go let's see if i went all the way down it's alive it's alive but it's not cutting all the way through maybe okay with the fact that it didn't slice all the way through and i think these pieces would just break off time to eat the tube best watermelon tube i've ever had let's see how the watermelon slicer compares to doing it the old-fashioned boring way [Music] in terms of effectiveness i would give the watermelon slicer a five out of five it cut the watermelon quickly and you ended up with a pretty nice looking display of watermelon slices plus you get a tube of watermelon that your family could fight over so it's time for the left-handed oil test and really this is a two-handed operation so the question would be how controllable or slippery is it and i am going to position it and push down and this one's a little bit harder to get started but i could do it really have to get a little bit of body weight in there there was a little bit less uh control based on the shape of these handles but we still got the tube so we're good in terms of usability i would give this a 4 i think there's still a little bit of room for improvement okay let's think about a redesign mechanically of course this is pretty simple so one small thing i was thinking of is i would look at the bottom edges of these blades and think about making them serrated in the sense that like a bread knife would be serrated i think it would help stabilize the watermelon a little bit more and maybe start cutting through the watermelon a little smoothly when you start the curvature of these handles i think i would exaggerate that curve a bit come down just slightly slightly slightly slightly deeper so that when you push your hands a little more secure inside there in terms of a buy rating i would give the watermelon slicer a5 i think it works really well the only downside is going to be the family arguments about who gets the center cocoa taps coconut tap its purpose in life is to tap into a coconut and give it a reclosable spout let's see how effective it is take off this green part and reveal this tooth end of the tube which i assume i plunge and twist into the coconut essentially i'm drilling it by hand [Music] boy at this point at home i think i would go get the power drill whoa okay the spout has a reverse thread so i need to twist it counterclockwise the reason for that i'm sure is once the spout's on you want to untwist the cap but not untwist the coconut so here's the wrench part of the handle it's a hex wrench put it on the tapper and start twisting until i feel it is tight enough pull the cap off and now now that looked like it would have been great but actually nothing came out did we get an empty coconut or do we have a faulty spout i feel something sloshing if i shake it it's coming out well i guess that could be a function of the threaded part that goes inside the coconut being just too deep i think you'd rather pour it out let's see how that compares to using just the kitchen knife [Music] in terms of effectiveness i would give this a one out of five my arms are just too tired to give it anything higher it's time for the left-handed oil test let's test its usability i'm going to primarily use my left hand to do this i can see this is not going to be easy lefty or righty but especially lefty you know the goal here may be just to be patient but this may take a while [Music] i'm going to just switch hands i'm going to give up using my left hand i'm going to see if i have any more luck using my right hands i'm going to give this just another 20 minutes then i'm giving up oh i'm through and let's see if i can start drinking now yum i'm getting nothing what a letdown i just don't know how to shake it and drink it at the same time that worked in terms of usability i would give it a one out of five takes way too much work and takes way too much time so let's think about what we can do to improve it so this tooth tube just is not doing it for me i think what i would do is look at designing a tool that is more like a screw mechanism start to screw and start to tap a hole into the screw but the handle could just be like a very typical handle that you would see for instance on a corkscrew the reason i would flare this is because as you're twisting you want to push against something so the problem is once this is tapped it's just not pouring out and it could be because the tap is too long so i would either put some holes in here or maybe some sort of slits just to make sure that the coconut water flows even when the coconut level water level is relatively shallow in terms of a buy rating i would give it a one the concept is good i just don't think this is the way to make that happen and it does need some lime citrus sprayer its purpose in life is to turn your limes lemons and oranges into miniature spray cans they come in two sizes uh in the same package you get a shorter one and a longer one i'm going to get started by chopping off the top part of the lemon and it's screwing in relatively easily and what i shouldn't have now is a lemon sprayer ready whoa don't do that at home i got in my eye but it's okay i think i'll just get comments about it i mean it doesn't hurt let's see how long i can go before we run out of juice [Music] i'm not getting anything like what i got the first time around let's try to juice up the lemon see what happens now oh yeah that's better oh i'm running out now i still think by the time we're finished we're going to have a lot of usable lemon left if you want to use only part of the lemon and waste the rest of it then i think this could be the tool for you i'm going to use the longer tap into the lemon see if i'm any more successful and yeah that is spraying pretty well it's getting into parts of the lemon that i didn't get to before but again it's good for a couple of pumps and then it kind of runs dry it's not not great and it looks like you're doing something important let's say you don't have a citrus spray at home let's see how it compares to just giving the lemon a squeeze [Music] so there's a difference you can see that doing it by hand you get a lot more juice out of the lemon in terms of effectiveness i would give this a two out of five it's got its cute factor but boy it really didn't empty that lemon i'm going to make my left hand slippery that really is a two-handed operation you can see i'm twisting my right hand as much or more than my left hand boy you can definitely feel the difference in it being slippery and a bit out of control there it goes it's starting to spray okay well that's successful let's try this again oh yeah it's lemon juice it's okay it's not feeling great on my finger i'm doing a lot of squeezing with my left hand which is probably more strength or more effort than i would like if you have any finger problems or dexterity problems at all it's going to be really difficult to use your fingertip in terms of usability i would give this a two out of five you get diminishing returns pretty quickly and your hand is just isn't feeling great let's think about a redesign what would i do to redesign this to make it a little bit easier to use and more effective i've been tracing a lot of fruit today twisting this into the lemon is okay although i may look at making this shape a little bit different it's a little bulbous right now i think i'll trace it as it is but i think i would make this shape just a little pointier so that it pierces the lemon a little more easily as for the pump itself i think that's where you're really relying on the fingertip which is the weakest linkage in the finger i think i would look at turning this into a two-fingered pump kind of like you're pumping windex so that you can actually get two fingers here so the trigger would be a little bit easier to pump this would still be the spray so the action would be more like this it would still spray forward but i think that can be worked out i think you'll still be stuck with the fact that you'll get only a couple of good sprays out of this before you need to roll it around the table by rating i would give the citrus sprayer a three i think it has entertainment value just be ready to do a little bit of work if you really want to empty this lemon also some personal advice keep this away from your eyes strawberry slicer it is designed to cut a strawberry into slices with one quick squeeze remove the green part of the strawberry based on this shape i'm going to stick the strawberry in skinny side first and let's give it a squeeze uh that worked pretty well uh the slices look fine i don't think it'll work as well if the strawberry was a little more resistant and here's one that's not quite as ripe i'm going to try one more larger strawberry let's give it a squeeze still not that bad it was okay i could pretty quickly get through this bowl of strawberries if i needed to slice them all let's see how the strawberry slice there compares to a plain old kitchen knife [Music] in terms of effectiveness i would give the strawberry slicer a four it cuts very quickly there's just a little bit of resistance that i detected let's test its usability my hands are normal male size but i'm really giving a stretch to that pinky and i'm really on my fingertips so i think this angle is excessive but i think my left hand being slippery is doing a little more complaining about it so i will squeeze and it worked okay let's try another one oh now i'm sure you didn't see that but i had a pinch point these two pieces come together but i've got the pad of my finger here got caught just a little bit still it was quick it wasn't difficult in terms of usability i would give this a three out of five i just don't think they consider smaller hands or slippery hands in the design yeah just pinch myself again oh okay it's time for a redesign let's see what i would suggest okay there's my strawberry about to get sliced to bits the shape of these handles and the amount of throw the amount of movement you have to make is really a bit excessive so i would look at a way to resolve that either by shaping the handle or giving some sort of curvature to it to keep your fingers a little more in place i'd also work on something to eliminate that pitch point there are a couple of ways to do that one is to increase the gap another is to just put a fin on here so it keeps your skin away from that crevice the way this is designed the first couple of millimeters of squeeze move that strawberry a lot which means the leverage is less than you would hope when you get down to the bottom that same amount of movement in the lever creates just a little bit of movement of the strawberry so you need a lot more force to get the strawberry started there's less force to finish the strawberry i would do the opposite i think i would experiment by making that curve in the opposite direction either making that curve uh straight or trying to see if i can make that curve do something different that movement do something different by having that curve go that way in terms of a buy rating i'm giving this a three out of five it does its job pretty well but i did pinch myself several times during the demonstration and i don't like getting bitten by my kitchen tools so the interesting thing about fruit gadgets as opposed to some other things you may find in the kitchen is there's a celebration to it there's a fun aspect to eating fruit and the best gadgets you can find will build upon that excitement the best gadgets have that spark they may be hard to come by obviously hard to come by but i really think the design teams and the engineering teams could have spent a little more time in the kitchen with some of these gadgets

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 759,912

Rating: 4.8972173 out of 5

Keywords: epicurious, fruit gadget, fruit slicer, gadget design, gadget test, kitchen gadget, kitchen gadget design, kitchen gadget test, kitchen gadgets, watermelon slicer, well equipped

Id: 1Il9YJv301s

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021