A food processor is a versatile kitchen appliance used to prepare ingredients by quickly chopping, kneading, shredding, slicing, or blending. Food processors are handy kitchen tools for quickly chopping, shredding, and slicing everything from tough nuts to soft cheeses, while also pulsing and blending sauces and dips. Food processors with S blades that nearly touched the sides of the work bowl aced our chopping, mixing, and puréeing tests. The best food processors on the market can be found here.
With a 7-cup work bowl, this is one of the larger small food processors on the market, and it comes with features and attachments to match: alternative chopping discs and blades, pushers, a spatula and an extra-large feed tube are all included as standard to make sure the Cuisinart Pro Classic is up to any culinary task you can throw at it. Key specs – Size: 40(H) x 32(W) x 28(D) cm; Bowl size: 3 litres; Power: 1000w; Attachments: 3 reversible grating/slicing discs, dough blade, stainless steel chopping blade, whisk/beater, citrus press, spatula, storage box; Additional notable features: 2-litre blender, EasyLock lid and dual force motor. The powerful appliance features a 720-watt motor, stainless steel blades, and seven different food prep functions, like mixing, chopping, shredding, and kneading. All food processors have the same basic components: a plastic work bowl that locks onto a motorized drive shaft in the processor’s base, a lid that locks onto the work bowl, an S-shaped blade and separate insertable discs for slicing vegetables and shredding cheese.
The standard features present inside the best quality mini food processor incorporate a powerful motor, stainless steel or ceramic blades, a two to eight cup chopper bowl, multi-tasking options, high and low power motor settings, BPA-free plastic, and a warranty. This food processor features a three-litre bowl (1.5-litre working capacity) with chopping blade, kneading tool, whisk and three reversible discs for slicing and grating. 3 blades: This Cuisinart model comes with a standard chopping blade, a shredding dish and a slicing disc—perfect for tackling all sorts of kitchen tasks.
I tested models ranging from 11 to 14 cup capacity, but you can get food processors that come with mini bowl and mini chopper options and as small as three cups. Cook’s Illustrated also recommended this model and says it excelled at chopping, slicing, and shredding.” In our tests, the main drawback to the Sous Chef was that it made a slightly looser mayonnaise than the Cuisinart Custom and mini processors we tested. (Both cookbook authors we spoke with for this guide use mini food processors in their kitchens.) A few machines, such as those in the Cuisinart Elite series, come with a gasket on the lid of the mixing bowl to prevent leaks.
All the food processors we tested have a similar construction: A heavy motor turns a spindle that can be fitted with various blades or disks inside a work bowl and lid. This processor includes seven attachment blades so that you have a blade that works, no matter if you are chopping, dicing, slicing or any other function it can perform in the kitchen with a food processor. In total, we spent close to 200 hours specifically testing and evaluating food processors and mini-choppers side-by-side, creating copious amounts of hummus, chopping dozens and dozens of tomatoes and onions, mixing up tons of pizza dough and pie crust dough, making mayo from scratch, and shredding an almost silly amount of cheese to evaluate and compare the results.
Having said that, this is a terrific food processor and well worth the price if you’re going to be doing things like making French fries or julienning carrots, since the Breville’s attachments include whisking, reversible shredding, French fry, julienne and slicing discs (the latter with 24 different settings), plus dough, mini and serrated S blades. The Cuisinart only has the essential S-blade and slicing/grating discs, but it’s all you really need to perform any food preparation task that these machines are so good at. It’s a little more expensive than some food processors, but the Cuisinart is a reliable and well-constructed model that’s built to last. Overall the KitchenAid – KPF1466 is a very good 14-cup capacity food processor and has some of the same attributes of the Breville: a heavy base supports a sturdy work bowl (14 cups), a mini bowl and blade for small jobs, a tightly fitting lid with a silicone seal that prevents leakage and a wide feed tube.
The Cuisinart – DLC-2A has a three-cup capacity, and the KitchenAid – KFC3516 has a 3-½ cup capacity, so these mini processors are intended for small jobs, such as chopping onion, mincing herbs or pureeing small batches. We tested two mini food processors — KitchenAid – KFC3516 and Cuisinart – DLC-2A — side by side, and both performed very well in quickly and evenly chopping vegetables and herbs. Food processors are relatively recent newcomers to the world of kitchen appliances, with commercial models appearing in the 1960’s and the first home food processor – from Cuisinart – going on the American market in the early 1970’s.
The Mini-Prep Plus isn’t exaggerating about the mini” part: the plastic work bowl has a 3-cup capacity, so this isn’t the food processor for feeding multitudes, but Cuisinart’s patented reversible stainless steel blade – and the fact that this processor can be set to chop or grind – means you’re getting an impressive amount of processing power for such a small package. For such a small food processor – the work bowl has a 3.5-cup capacity – the KitchenAid Mini comes with an impressive number of features and attachments, including a drizzle bowl to simplify adding liquids and a pulse function to help you chop food to the consistency you want. When preparing meals with fresh vegetables or other ingredients that require chopping, slicing, mincing, or shredding, a food processor saves you valuable time.
The easy-to-use model works by simply closing the lid on the three-cup glass bowl and pressing down, which activates the high-quality stainless steel blades to start chopping. Unlike traditional full-sized food processors, mini processors don’t generally have a large chute or selection of blades for tasks such as shredding and slicing, which means they’re unable to slice and grate. Most of the models of these-days mini food processors come with the interchangeable blades.
The large capacity of 7-cup and advanced features make this appliance as the best mini food processors from KitchenAid. As opposed to mid-priced models, BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Processor provides not only the standard slicing, shredding discs and S blade, but also a storage box with additional discs and blades. In terms of attachments, most mid- to full-size food processors come with a stainless steel S-shaped blade for chopping, and discs for slicing and shredding.
We tested two high-end food processors, the 16-Cup KitchenAid ProLine Series ($699.95) and the Waring Commercial 3.5-Quart Pro Food Processor ($426.93), running them through the same tests as our average-priced models to see whether their professional” designation made any difference to their performance and sturdiness, and whether they offered any extra features that made them worth nearly two to three times the price of an ordinary food processor. In terms of blades, some models were equipped with just the basics—a chopping blade and a shredding/slicing disk—while others arrived with sizable boxes of extra attachments. If slicing, dicing, chopping and whipping aren’t your favourite things to do in the kitchen, save yourself some precious prep time and make your cooking experience easier with one of these nifty food processors.
Food processors typically come with a clear plastic mixing bowl, a lid and an S-shaped chopping blade. Most food processors come standard with a chopping/mixing blade and a reversible slicing/shredding disc. Similar to the Cuisinart Chopper, the KitchenAid Chef’s Chopper has a slightly smaller bowl (3.5-cup) with an added wet/dry compartment on the lid for adding liquids or dry ingredients while chopping.
We recommend the Cuisinart Elite Collection 12-cup Food Processor, which includes both a large 12-cup bowl and smaller 4-cup bowl, five slicing disks and blades and electronic touch pad. Simply toss ingredients in the 3-cup container, twist and lock the lid, then pull an easy-to-grip cord to spin the chopping blades. That might make it easy to dismiss, but the Cuisinart does a very good job across the core functions of a food processor, from chopping to shredding.
Most models included a plastic dough blade, except for our winning Cuisinart model, which calls for using the metal chopping blade to mix doughs (though a dough blade is an optional accessory). It’s nice to have a mini chopper built into a larger processor, but some models leaked when we added even a small amount of wet ingredients to that smaller bowl. Food processors not only help with chopping, dicing, and slicing, they help with pureeing and even kneading the dough as well.
The best-rated food processors feature bowls and blades that have solid construction behind them. Power of the motor – The motor should be powerful enough to enable the mini food processor to perform a number of functions such as chopping, shredding, kneading, crushing, etc.