Crinkle-cutting isn’t just a nostalgic gimmick; it’s a clever way to boost texture, crunch, and sauce-gripping power in fries, pickles, carrot sticks, and much more. Here’s how and when to use those wavy blades to make your food sturdier, crispier, and a whole lot more fun to eat.
Despite our shared last name, my grandmother hated cooking. She was infamous in our family for using her oven as a cabinet for potato chips and sliced bread. And yet, when I helped clean out the kitchen after she died, I found dozens of mid-century kitchen implements I couldn’t hope to name. A fork with eight tines. An Iron Maiden the size of an egg. A terrifying vessel shaped like the decapitated head of a winking, coquettish cat.
The most intriguing of these was a corrugated stainless-steel blade with an overhead Bakelite handle. It looked like a funhouse guillotine.
“It’s a crinkle-cutter,” my mom scoffed.
So, yes: a funhouse guillotine.
At the time, I thought of crinkle-cutting largely as a retro affectation, or a patronizing method for making vegetables more palatable to kids. But the benefits of a crinkle-cutter are more than aesthetic. Crinkle-cutting maximizes surface area, boosting texture, crunch, and condiment absorption for all kinds of foods—fries, carrots, pickles, and much more.
Now, I recognize crinkle-cutting as the domain of serious cooks and eaters. Once you experience the dip-smuggling power of a crinkle-cut carrot, you’ll never want to put a boring, smooth carrot stick on a relish tray again.
The Life-Changing Magic of Crinkle-Cutting
When weighing when to crinkle-cut, think like an engineer. There’s a reason you see corrugated metal on roofs and pole barns and corrugated cardboard in shipping materials. Corrugations make materials stronger and stiffer. Crinkle-cutting foods can similarly improve their crunch, rigidity, and grip.
Because of its surface-area-boosting powers, crinkle-cutting is especially beneficial for roasted or fried foods, where you want to maximize crispness and crunch. I’ve used mine for cottage fries, French fries, thick-cut Saratoga chips—even roasted and grilled potato slices. The ridges also offer more pockets for spices and sauces to settle into, boosting flavor along with texture.
But the benefits go beyond roasted and fried food. Crinkle-cutting can boost crunch (and visual interest) in a giardiniera or Mexican escabeche. It can also give raw or slippery fruits and vegetables more grip: A crinkle-cut pickle chip is less likely to slide off your burger between bites; a crinkle-cut banana slice is less likely to ooze out of your Elvis-style peanut butter sandwich.
I’ve even come around to crinkle-cutting purely for aesthetic charm. Does it make foods look like they teleported from the Atomic Age? Sure. But we’re post-modernist cuisine now: A little kitsch is good. I recommend slicing hard-boiled eggs with a crinkle-cutter to make especially pretty deviled eggs, or adding corrugated slices of carrots and cukes to a mayonnaise-slicked Midwestern pasta salad.
Will It Crinkle-Cut?
The answer to “Will it crinkle-cut?” is usually “Yes.” The guardrails are pretty clear. You should not use a crinkle-cutter to flense a delicate fish, or to debone a chicken (unless the chicken has really weird bones).
But some exceptions are less obvious. I don’t recommend crinkle-cutting most alliums—a wavy cutter will wreak havoc on the cell walls of garlic and onions, releasing more of their sharp and sulfurous flavor compounds. I also avoid crinkle-cutting delicate foods like tomatoes, as the cutter is more likely to crush them than slice them.
Crinkle-cutters, like serrated knives, dull over time and can be particularly tough to sharpen at home. That means I don’t bust out my hand-me-down cutter for any task that requires paper-thin slices or a razor-sharp blade.
My vintage funhouse guillotine isn’t the only way to crinkle, of course. Wavy blades are available for many mandoline slicers and food processors, and they can help achieve thinner, more uniform slices. But I favor the hand-held varieties for one reason—they’re more versatile, especially if you want to use your cutter for more decorative work or garnishes. How else could one achieve the intricate cuts necessary to make webbed carrot feet for a squash goose?
I don’t know whether my grandmother ever made a squash goose. I’m not sure she used the crinkle-cutter at all (I know she used the terrifying cat vessels). But I’m grateful to her for the introduction. We can all benefit from the crinkle-cutter’s texture-amping abilities. But we can also benefit from its aesthetic reminder: We should all keep playing with our food.
