Norpro Bread Slicer with Crumb Catcher Review

The Norpro Bread Slicer with Crumb Catcher is a mediocre combo product available for something around $25. This is still better than slicing bread on the plain cutting or pizza board. This apparatus facilitates you in cutting the bread with fairly equal thickness and most important of all gets the work done without hurting the fingers. This is a very poorly designed and constructed device with lot of flaws. It could have been better if they had put some serious thought in to the practical application of this tool and come out with a decent working mechanism. It seems as if they were in a hurry to bring out this product. I am still searching for a better bread slicer.

This is a very simple device with no technical sophisticated parts. That is a good concept, but it should have served the purpose with efficiency. The Norpro Bread Slicer with Crumb Catcher basically consists of a wooden base, acrylic guide and a detachable crumb collector. The acrylic guides come with a fixed slicing thickness of 0.5 inch and this can not be altered. So you can get the bread slice of only this thickness and nothing more, nothing less. The only good feature of this tool is that the crumbs are directly collected in the catcher and don't spread out. So this could be cleaned easily. Moreover if you are not particular about the exact thickness of the bread, then it is a good device.

It would not be wrong if I say that you can get the bread sliced in uniform thickness, if you are really skilled in handling the knife and could do some tricks to push the knife through the bread and take it on the other side. I was told that a long serrated knife would be finer, but please do not waste your time. This works on a trial and error basis system.

The acrylic guides that rare supposed to hold the bread in place keeps moving and often skids. I don't understand the idea behind such a tall guide. To accommodate the bread in this guide, you have to add thrice the normal amount of leavening agent to expand the bread substantially.

The wooden base is of cheap quality and it can not be washed after use. The wood is not hard and gets scratches and knife marks. Make sure that bread is cold before slicing.