Always avoided buying Mangos because of the hassle cutting them. Noticed this tool on Amazon and decided to give it a try (although I did not expect it to work). The design is quite ingenious. The cutting blade is flexible enough to "hug" the pit and cut the fruit away. I would highly recommend.
I agree with the earlier poster that this device allows you to make mango salsa much faster. Yes there is still a little cutting to get meat off the seed, but most of the work is done instantly and painlessly.
Pros:
Makes seeding a mango almost instant
Cons:
I don't know what I'll do when this device eventually dulls (sharpening it will be difficult)
It doesn't handle the largest sizes of mangoes
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This little invention I just bought cuts out a lot of mango and a lot of BS. I pay about $1.50 per mango, so losing flesh in cutting the things up is like a punch in the throat. Mangoes are well connected to their skin and seed, making it hard not to waste or at least end up with a million little hacked off pieces and cut up hands.
I didn't give it 5 stars simply because there is still a small bit of waste, but given the stubborn nature of the mango, that's inevitable. Someday someone will breed a mango that just pops away from the seed like a peach.
There's a slight learning curve on the tool, but I got it on my first try. I doesn't look like it should work but it does. Amazing and rewarding the first time you use it and have two robust shoulders taken off the seed.
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The problem with mangos is that the pit is well-secured inside the fruit by a pit with long, tough fibers attached. The pit is an inconvenient flat oblong, slippery under the knife. However, if you admire the "peach soaked in turpentine" exotic taste (and I certainly do) you might wonder if there isn't some way to cut out the flesh of the mango without a long, hard struggle.
This device is positioned over the mango like an apple corer, allowing you to cut the fibers around the pit and release it from (most) of the meat. While there is still some waste, and while mangos and their pits vary in size, this is pretty good.
It certainly beats my current method of mango preparation, which is to slice along side of the pit, making two shallow halves. I dice the fruit inside the hull and slice it off that tough skin with a knife positioned flat along the skin. I get cubes of mango, and then I either try to trim the pit or I nibble it as a cook's tidbit.
This cutter is faster by far than my old method and a lot neater. Big thumbs up to OXO for figuring this out.
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I was so excited after the first time I used this tool. I was amazed at how easily I was able to split my way through a mango. With moderate pressure, this tool whizzed right through the mango without a problem and I ended up with two perfectly sliced halves. As I am a mango fanatic, it was love at first sight with this tool.
The honeymoon was short-lived, however. After a handful of uses, I noticed I was having problems with my mango splitter. What once sailed through the mango was now giving me problems right from the get go. Just piercing through the top of the mango was work enough, and with the added pressure now required, my mangoes were quickly becoming mangled, mutilated messes, and my cutting board and counter tops would be drenched in mango juice. What's worse I could only get the implement about half way through the mango, but no more, and then I had a bear of a time retrieving the splitter from the fruit at all. At first I thought maybe I was using it on too ripe mangoes, and because I didn't want to give up on my beloved mango splitter, I gave it several more tries with mangoes of varying ripeness. Unfortunately, I killed at least a half a dozen mangoes in the process.
Bottom line...this implement works wonderfully from the start, but the blades quickly dull leaving you with a useless apparatus. I have 2 other friends that have had the exact same experience as me with the Oxo Mango Splitter, so I highly doubt it was only mine that had this problem. I have since returned to using my chef's nice to get at my mangoes. It's a bit of a pain, but at least no mangoes have to be killed in the process. Sorry, OXO, but you need to go back to the drawing board with this one.
These knives are great. Nice and sharp, will last a long time. However, the description states that they have Fibrox handles but they actually do not. They have just a basic plastic handle. But this really shouldn't sway you from buying them. You're still getting three knives for the price of two.
