A Kitchen Top Cross Dicer

The Story

The goal is to create a dicer that delivers perfect cross-diced vegetables every time. It should be designed for the modern cook and foodie, who wants perfectly diced cubes, but without the hassle of knife cutting. There are cross dicers for commercial kitchens, but they are both large and expensive, and therefore two of the challenges here are clearly to make the device small and affordable.

What is Cross Dicing?

Simply put, cross dicing is dicing. That is, it is what people and recipes mean when they say 'diced'. Dicing is essentially cutting a food product into little cubes. Unfortunately this simple fact is usually lost when it comes to consumer vegetable dicers. These dicers actually create cuboids and not cubes. This is indeed desired if you wish to dice a potato into French fries, but for most other purposes you need cubes.

The Power of Cubes

Cubes, large and small, are what cooks desire when preparing most heated dishes. Cutting vegetables into cubes allows them to cook evenly and rapidly, and release their flavor into the prepared dish. The most challenging vegetables, when it comes to dicing, may be the two most popular vegetables used in cooking, onions and tomatoes. Existing consumer dicers won't help you with these two, for instead of cubes they will create cuboids, which are totally unsuitable.

The problem is that existing consumer dicers use grids (usually metal ones) to dice vegetables in two dimensions, but what is truly required here is a three dimensional grid. A three dimensional grid creates cubes rather than cuboids, and is the solution for the desired diced vegetables.