Certain brands offer part replacements, so look first to see whether you can just replace the blade before buying a new appliance. While these manual choppers still require a little bit of elbow grease to chop down into the veggies, it’s still much easier and quicker than chopping all of these veggies by hand. They are quite compact as well, so if you don’t have a ton of extra kitchen space, you’ll likely still be able to fit a manual food chopper into a drawer or cabinet. This mini food processor won’t knead dough like a big food processor can, but it will make quick work of chopping everything from apples to nuts to zucchini. It can also blend small amounts of food into purees or emulsify your salad dressing. We tested it with onions, peppers, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, nuts, and garlic, and it worked well with all of them.
We’ve been long-term testing the Cuisinart Custom 14 since 2013, and it remains a workhorse in the kitchen. Year after year, we’ve made slaws, grated cheese, blended dips, chopped nuts, and kneaded pizza dough in it—and it continues to work well. The 14-cup bowl doesn’t leak, and the controls are exactly what you need. The bowl has scratched a bit (because we’ve stored the sharp blades inside it), but otherwise it looks like new. We’ve found that it’s slightly annoying to clean under the on/off buttons, but a damp sponge or paper towel makes the task easier. For the most part, food choppers—including their blades, bowls, and lids—are dishwasher safe.
She’s also a prolific food blogger and the author of “Make Ahead Bread,” which is aimed at demystifying the art of bread making. Donna loves checking out new kitchen gadgets—she’s tested hundreds of products for The Spruce Eats, including eight food choppers for this roundup. No need for electricity, manual pushing, or cranking—this cordless electric chopper has a 5-cup capacity and can chop up to 40 onions on a single charge. A low-battery indicator warns when it’s time to recharge the battery, which takes about two hours for a full charge.
The preprogrammed recipes seemed straightforward, but there are only 201 total. This model also takes up a ton of counter space and weighs 30 pounds; it’s definitely not something you’ll want to lug around your kitchen often. Ideally we’d like to test a working model in the future, but we feel we can dismiss The Complete Chef for now due to its size, weight, hefty price, limited recipe database, and lack of customer support. After cuisinart air fryer oven 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.
In testing, we found that this tool was efficient at cutting onions, and unlike cutters with moving blades, this one made neat, even cuts. All we had to do was load a halved onion and push down to shove it through the blades. The chopper cup is actually two pieces—an inner cup that holds the food, and an outer shroud. If the inner cup is removed, the chopper can be used with just the shroud on a cutting board.
Most full-size food processors also come with blades for slicing and grating, which a blender can’t do. To help you find the best food choppers for all your kitchen prep, we sent top-rated choppers to our experienced product tester. Each one was carefully assessed during hours of home kitchen testing and used to chop nuts, garlic, and various vegetables. Then, the food choppers were all rated on design, ease of use, size, ease of cleaning, convenience, overall effectiveness, and overall value.
Smaller choppers are great for prepping smaller items like garlic, ginger, herbs, and nuts, while larger units are great for bigger items like onions, carrots, peppers, and celery. The zigzag blade in this chopper performs more cuts per push than choppers with an X-blade, and the blade rotates with each push so food is chopped more evenly. We found that it did well with onions, carrots, mushrooms, and tomatoes, and a little less well with green peppers. In fact, of all the food processors, blenders, and immersion blenders we’ve tested for various guides, we found making mayo easiest in a mini food processor like the Food Chopper. That’s because its lid has a small indent to hold oil and a small hole that allows the oil to pour directly onto the blades so you have a consistent, measured stream.
She previously edited cookbooks and craft books for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and she started reviewing kitchen gear back in 2013. She sews many of her own clothes, which has made her obsessive about high-quality fabrics—whether in a dress or bedsheets. Michael Sullivan has been a staff writer on the kitchen team at Wirecutter since 2016. Previously, he was an editor at the International Culinary Center in New York.
You can’t knead dough or shred ingredients in it, but you can grind or chop small portions of vegetables or nuts, which is more tedious to do by hand. Soaking the parts in hot soapy water is a great way to remove any remaining residue. If you can, it’s a good idea to get into the nooks and crannies around the blade, inside the food pressers, and around cuisinart toaster costco the tube with a bottle brush or toothbrush. In the case of electric food processors, make sure that the device is cooled down and unplugged if you are going to wipe the base with a hot, damp cloth. The blades are very sharp, so take care when handling them, but a plastic piece on top of the blade assembly provides a place to hold it safely.