“It’s great for chopping vegetables in bulk,” says Shilpa. “You can shred cheese. You can make dough in there, you can make batters in there. You can make soft serve in there. I think it’s much more functional than a blender.” Fighting words these may be for a Vitamix fan, but food processors can handle a lot of jobs that even the best blenders simply can’t. The reasons being that A) food processors don’t need a certain level of liquid to function properly like blenders do, and B) Food processors rely on a central chopping blade that processes everything in the work bowl simultaneously. Blenders have a fixed slicing blade that works from the bottom up, gradually pureeing ingredients as they sink down. Food processors can execute everything between a rough chop and a puree with consistency and speed.
To Uskokovic, this is best exemplified by making falafel: “When I make falafel at home I only use my food processor. You can’t get that same finely chopped but still bitsy texture from anything other appliance. You would have to chop it all by hand—which is a bitch to do.”
Cuisinart sells multiple food processors with different bowl capacities, but Uskokovic strongly endorses the 14-cup capacity if you want to get the most out of your machine. This is especially true if you are interested in using it for kneading doughs, as anything smaller really cannot handle the volume of ingredients that typical bread recipes require.
A bigger food processor upgrade: Breville Sous Chef, 16-Cup
One thing we product testers have come to understand about Breville is that they really pay attention to the details. The Breville Sous Chef motor is both more powerful and quieter than the Cuisinart’s. It also has the widest feed tube of any food processor we’ve tested. Its handling and ergonomics make it one of the most comfortable to use right out of the box, and the general design is intuitive. The work bowl clicks into place easily without latches or locks, and it has a streamlined design with fewer nooks and crannies that makes cleaning up less of a pain. (This matters, because really no food processor is dishwasher safe, even if they claim to sort of be.)
The Sous Chef comes with several food processor attachments, including a dough blade, a reversible shredding disc, and an adjustable slicing disc with 24 settings that range from 0.3 mm to 8 mm. That last attachment allows the Sous Chef to function like an automatic (and arguably safer) mandoline slicer.
The primary drawback to the Sous Chef (and most Breville appliances) is that they can be expensive, and the 16-Cup Sous Chef will cost you notably more than the 14-Cup Cuisinart would. However, that extra capacity means you can do just about anything without worries of spillage.
The food processor a professional chef uses at home: Cuisinart 7 Cup Food Processor
One might expect a professional chef to opt for the most heavy-duty appliances out there. At least at home though, chef Anita Lo prefers the convenience and simplicity of the smaller Cuisinart food processor. “If you’re just processing a small amount of food it just doesn’t work in a big processor.” Lo says, “sometimes you just need a few tablespoons of something pureed or whatever and that doesn’t work with a big bowl.”
Lo has had the same 10-cup Cuisinart food processor for 25 years, and recently purchased a 7-cup model for her place in the city where storage space is limited, and has been pleased with its performance. Most of the time, Lo reaches for her food processor for making purees, mincing pestos, dicing bread crumbs, and prepping small batches of ingredients. In these instances a larger, more full-size model would be overkill.
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