The size of the feed tubes in the lid (used to insert potatoes, carrots, or other hunks of food to be sliced or shredded) also makes a difference. Most full-size processors come with a wide feed tube that’s fitted with a food presser, which has a narrower feed tube (with its own presser) in the center. The larger tube should be big enough cuisinart air fryer oven to easily fit a block of cheese or a potato, so you don’t have to spend time cutting food into pieces that are small enough to fit. But the smaller tube needs to be narrow enough to keep carrots and other thin items upright during slicing. Michael Sullivan is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter and has covered food processors since 2016.
I replaced the bowl once, and beyond that, have used it frequently and it continues to go strong. It has a drizzle basin, which lets oil enter at a perfect speed for Caesar dressing or pesto, as well as a patented auto-reserving blade with a blunt edge suitable for grinding spices. You’ll also appreciate the blade-locking system that secures the blade in place while you remove your mixture. We weren’t impressed with the Magimix by Robot-Coupe 14-Cup Food Processor. It wasn’t able to chop as evenly as the Breville Sous Chef 16 Pro or the Cuisinart Custom 14.
It made quick work of most of the onion we added, but some of the larger pieces got stuck and needed adjusting, which didn’t happen with any of the other models. Also, it had a difficult time getting the hummus smooth, requiring a long blending period—which isn’t very pleasant to sit through, given the machine’s high-pitched mechanical sound. In testing, we found this cuisinart air fryer oven machine to be the fastest and most powerful. It finely chopped an onion blindingly fast, and puréed the smoothest hummus of the bunch. If you often spend time finely chopping produce or only need single batches of pesto or romesco, it’s the ideal tool to add to your collection. Yes, the Cuisinart Cordless Chopper is designed to handle frozen ingredients with ease.
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 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 Cuisinart’s three-year warranty on parts and five-year warranty on the motor aren’t the best among the models we tested, but they’re still pretty good.
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 cuisinart toa60 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.
And we didn’t notice any straining or stuttering of this model’s 240-watt motor, even when it was chopping a fibrous jumbo carrot. As long as you don’t try to use the Food Chopper for heavy tasks, such as making nut butter, we don’t think there’s much risk of burning out the motor. The Cuisinart has a strong motor and a heavy base (roughly 18 pounds with the bowl on) that keeps it stable. Though its 750-watt motor is less powerful than those on some other models we tested, such as the 1,200-watt Breville Sous Chef (our upgrade pick), this didn’t negatively affect the Cuisinart’s performance. Making pizza dough was our most motor-intensive test, and the Custom 14 kneaded it effortlessly, without wiggling across the counter like some other processors we tried. As a private chef, I can say this brand’s mini food processor is worth the splurge, as I’ve owned one for over two decades.