Electric food choppers (aka mini food processors) are a great way to cut down on prep time. They take up a small amount of counter space and require access to an outlet (though there are cuisinart toaster costco some battery-operated choppers that are cord-free). Unlike full-size food processors, electric choppers are much smaller, only have one blade option, and cannot process as much food.
With a Cuisinart food processor, you can quickly and effortlessly chop, grind or mix your favorite foods. When this innovative appliance first debuted in 1973, chefs and home cooks across the country quickly realized that Cuisinart food processors could drastically speed up food preparation. Today, thanks to new technology and added functions, Cuisinart choppers are even more efficient at making food for your favorite dishes.
Perry is a main producer of Outside the Labs content at CR, where she evaluates products in her tiny Manhattan apartment. Like many KitchenAid appliances, this unit comes in a variety of colors to match the kitchen or add a pop of color. The Mini Prep Pro chops, mixes, blends and purées, perfect for everday chopping and for making your own dips and sauces.
All we had to do was load a halved onion and push down to shove it through the blades. Iconic Cuisinart® food processors chop, purée, slice, and shred with ease. The Cuisinart FP-13DGM Elemental 13 Cup Food Processor and Dicing Kit didn’t chop as evenly as our picks. Our testers were impressed with the dicing kit, which chopped firm vegetables like potatoes and carrots into even cubes.
Its smaller, 12-cup capacity was also more limiting than the Cuisinart’s 14-cup bowl. After testing models with storage boxes, we found that such boxes are convenient for keeping attachments organized, and they’re worth investing in if your model doesn’t come with one. You can also organize blades and disks in a designated Tupperware-style container, basket, or other receptacle. We store the Cuisinart Custom 14’s extra blades and disks inside the processor’s work bowl, but be advised that this can scratch the bowl. The Sous Chef’s thoughtful design was what really sold us on this machine. Other machines require you to fit the bowl over a shank on the base, but the Sous Chef has a flat attachment, with the shank attached to the inside of the work bowl.
The Sous Chef is the only model we tested that had an LCD timer (which counts up and down), and this model also has retractable cord storage. We didn’t try the machine’s french fry disk, julienne disk, or emulsifying disk attachments, but we did use the handy cleaning brush, which did a great job of getting trapped bits out of the slicing disk. The obvious drawback to all of these attachments is that they take up a lot of space, and they may not get much use (how often do you make fries, for example?). We appreciate that Breville provides a storage case for the attachments, but the box takes up almost as much cupboard space as the machine itself. The Breville Sous Chef diced tomatoes and onions evenly, and it chopped nuts to a more consistent texture than the Cuisinart.
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. The Breville Sous Chef 16 Pro is more powerful than the Cuisinart Custom 14, cuisinart toa60 so it’s the machine you’ll want when you’re cooking for large groups or if you process food several times a week. In fact, despite the 16-cup Sous Chef’s many accessories, it was one of the easiest models to clean. That said, if you only use a food processor occasionally, the Breville’s high cost probably outweighs its benefits.