I test pricey kitchen appliances for a living but this gadget under £15 is the one I use every single day for food prep
It's under £15 and never needs recharging
As Ideal Home's Kitchen Appliances Editor, I've accumulated my fair share of kitchen gadgets. From my coffee machine to my air fryer, I'm pretty particular about what gets a spot on my worktop and as you might have guessed from my job title, I love cooking, so I'm always on the hunt for something to make chopping onions, peppers and garlic a bit easier.
In pursuit of that, I've tried many of the best mini choppers and food processors of all price ranges in the last few years to see which fit best into our guides. We even recently tested (and awarded 5 stars) the Sage Paradice 16, which will set you back a jaw-dropping £579.00.
And yet, despite all of the impressive and expensive gadgets I've tried, I keep reaching for one of the most affordable mini choppers I've seen. Yep, it's the Salter Press Chopper, available from Amazon for £14.99 that I go back to time and time again. Here's why sometimes you don't need to break the bank to find a genuinely useful addition to your kitchen.
This manual mini chopper is the perfect size for stashing in your kitchen, with no wires, plugging in or charging requires. Affordable but still sturdy, it's an efficient timesaver for midweek meals.
Why the Salter Mini Chopper is my kitchen essential
I find a food processor is an important thing to have in a kitchen. I tend to use mine for making humus and sauces quite frequently, but having to retrieve it from its storage spot and plug it in sometimes feels more time consuming than the chopping task at hand.
That's where this Salter chopper is so handy. It's small enough for me to keep in a cupboard under my worktop, and has several blades inside to make chopping onions and other vegetables to a fine level easy. I've tried other types like this before, including one like this with a pull cord, but I find the press mechanism on this Salter less fiddly and prone to breaking. All you need to do is load it up and pull across the button, and you can chop to your heart's content.
Thanks to this gadget I never have to go through the painful experience of powering through the tears to chop onions by hand. It also makes quickly chopping up other veggies or herbs insanely easy.
The latest trend towards cordless appliances is one that I don't see going anywhere soon, but in a world of chargers, batteries and drawers full of mismatched cords (in my flat at least), I've been enjoying this simple little tool. It's on the small side for sure, and therefore best for chopping one thing at a time, but it's also perfectly functional. And for under £15, you can't say fairer than that!
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Molly is Ideal Home’s Kitchen Appliances Editor and an all-around baking and cooking enthusiast. She joined the team in September 2022 as an Ecommerce Editor after working across Real Homes, Homes & Gardens and Livingetc. She's been reviewing products for 4 years and now specialises in weighing up kitchen essentials' pros and cons, from air fryers to bean-to-cup coffee machines.
She's always been a keen reader, so after graduating from the University of Exeter in 2020 she was thrilled to find a way to write as a full-time job. Nowadays, she spends her days at home or the Ideal Home test facility trying out new kitchen innovations to see if they’re worth a space on your worktop. Her most beloved and hard-working appliance is her Sage coffee machine though she also takes the title of Ideal Home’s in-house air fryer expert after writing about them religiously over the past few years.
When she's not thinking or writing about kitchen appliances, she loves getting around London exploring new places, going for a dip at the Ladies’ Pond and consuming every bit of pop culture she can get her hands on.
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