A chef’s knife is the wrong tool for this job, and if you’ve ever tried to cut a clean slice off a block of cheddar or Gouda with one, you already know why. The knife either drags and crumbles the block, or the cheese sticks to the blade and you end up prying slices off with your fingers. A dedicated cheese slicer with an angled, non-stick blade solves both problems in the same motion.
The OXO Good Grips Non-Stick Cheese Slicer uses a single sharp blade set into a plane rather than a wire, which matters more than it sounds. Wire slicers can saw through soft, crumbly cheeses unevenly and tend to bind up on anything semi-hard, but a fixed blade glides through in one smooth pass. Tilt the plane back and you get a thicker slice for sandwiches; angle it forward and it shaves off something thin enough for a cheese board.
The head itself has a non-stick coating, so instead of a slice welding itself to the metal, which is the annoying part of most slicers once the cheese is even slightly soft or at room temperature, it releases cleanly with a light shake. That detail is really what separates a slicer worth keeping from one that ends up shoved to the back of a drawer after a week.
It’s dishwasher safe, which matters given how often cheese residue gets stuck in the corners of anything textured, and the handle has OXO’s usual soft, non-slip grip, so it doesn’t feel awkward even with wet or slightly greasy hands. It’s a single-purpose gadget, sure, but it’s the kind that earns permanent drawer space once you’ve used it a handful of times, especially if cheese boards or packed lunches are a regular thing in your kitchen.
If you’re currently making do with a chef’s knife or a flimsy wire cutter that mangles half of what you slice, this is a straightforward upgrade that takes up almost no drawer space and saves a genuine amount of frustration.
