Best Food Processors And Choppers Of 2021
Michael Sullivan is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter and has covered food processors since 2016. He’s spent dozens of hours shredding cheese, chopping vegetables, mixing doughs, and whipping up mayonnaise for this guide. This guide builds on work by Wirecutter deputy editor Christine Cyr Clisset. Using the attachment tube, you can mount the shredding or slicing disk to the food processor’s motor. Without the attachment tube in place, the Cuisinart Custom’s safety features kick in and the machine won’t turn on. Most food processors are capable of making smoothies, but the process is a little different than if you were to use a blender.
Like the Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus , this model runs only while you hold the “on” button down. To operate it, you squeeze a tab on the top of the handle, which we found more comfortable to do than holding down cuisinart pots and pans set buttons on the base of the Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus. The Cuisinart’s three-year warranty on parts and five-year warranty on the motor aren’t the best among the models we tested, but they’re still pretty good.
The nine-cup capacity should be ample for most home cooks, but Cuisinart’s 11-cup sister model is ideal if you entertain often and are making larger batches. This Cuisinart includes a slicer disc, shredding disc, new chopping blade, detachable stem, spatula, and recipe book. This includes one reversible slicing and shredding disc and a metal chopping blade, so you won’t have a lot of extras to store. When you’re done using it, the lid can be flipped upside down so the feed tube is inside the bowl, and the cord wraps neatly so it won’t get in the way. If you’re looking for something even smaller, Hamilton Beach makes 8-cup processors, too. Some food processors come with mini chopping bowl attachments to accommodate lighter loads, but if all you do is chop small batches, opt for a food chopper.
The Cuisinart 14-cup food processor, for example, can only hold about three cups of liquid before springing a leak. For smoothies, thin soups and cocktails, stick with a high-speed blender or hand blender and spare yourself the cleanup. A is one handy appliance that can do the work of your chef’s knife, mortar and pestle, blender, stand mixer and even your own dough-kneading hands. “Just tried this out to make salsa and it’s absolutely amazing,” one five-star shopper shares.
Cuisinart has made a name for themselves with some of the most reliable, user-friendly food processors on the market. As the name suggests, the work bowl of DFP-14BCNY is 14 cups of capacity. The docking is standard as the bowl locks into the motor base with a simple turn counterclockwise. The lid uses the same mechanics as we can lock/unlock it by only twisting.
And though we’re not huge fans of the mini bowls on most of the big processors, we liked the Sous Chef’s 2½-cup bowl best among the ones we’ve tried. Deeper than the others, this bowl has a design that seemed to make uniformly mincing fresh parsley easier. This KitchenAid comes with relatively few parts and it disassembles easily for cleaning. We especially appreciate that the bowl has a handle, since we struggled to remove bowls that didn’t have one, especially when we were working with greasy hands.