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. 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. In the lab, we evaluate each model’s ability to chop almonds and onions uniformly, grate Parmesan cheese, and purée peas and carrots into a smooth mixture. We also measure noise, because while all models are noisy, some are much more grating than others.
A nonskid ring on the bottom of the bowl keeps it from slipping, so you just rest a hand on top and pull the handle with the other hand. In testing, we also found it easy to hold the chopper at an angle when we needed to encourage small amounts of food to fall into the cuisinart toa60 blades. You can use this device to make a salsa, prepare ingredients for a soup, cut up cheese for a charcuterie board or chop onions without crying your eyes out. The Sous Chef is solidly built, with a hefty base that weighs about 15½ pounds (excluding the bowl).
With the processors that came with a disk for grating, we also tried shredding both carrots and soft mozzarella cheese (which can turn to mush if the grater blades aren’t sharp). Finally, we cleaned the bowls, lids, disks, and food pressers of each model by hand—eight times. This test revealed more difficult-to-reach nooks and crannies than we’d expected to find in some machines. The Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor has been our top pick since 2013 because it does everything a great food processor should do, without any unnecessary extras. Unlike those of some other models we tested, the Cuisinart’s base remained stable on the counter, even when processing double batches of dough. This model is easy to clean, and the attachments store neatly inside the bowl, preventing clutter.
It offers extra power; a larger, 16-cup blending bowl; and nicer features compared with the Cuisinart Custom 14. The Sous Chef powered through an entire russet potato in less than a second—noticeably faster than any of the other models. And despite its power, the Sous Chef was the quietest of the bunch at kneading dough. But it’s oversized and significantly more expensive than the Cuisinart, and it comes with a bulky bundle of accessories that you may not need.
Certain brands offer part replacements, so look first to see whether you can just replace the blade before buying a new appliance. The blades are formed in a wave pattern and rotate for even chopping, while the nonskid cuisinart toaster costco base keeps the chopper from wandering around the counter when it’s being used. We tested it with a variety of vegetables, including onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, and carrots, and it did a good job with them.