Unlike manual choppers, though, electric food choppers can also make salad dressing, mayonnaise, and other emulsified sauces. To start, we tested how evenly each food processor could chop a variety of ingredients, including cuisinart air fryer oven onions, fibrous carrots, soft tomatoes, delicate parsley, and whole almonds. We also made a 1-cup batch of mayonnaise in the processors to see how quickly and evenly they could produce a stable emulsification.
The Sous Chef is solidly built, with a hefty base that weighs about 15½ pounds (excluding the bowl). This processor also comes with a limited one-year product warranty and has a 25-year warranty on the motor—by far the longest warranty on a motor of any of the models we tested. Another drawback to the Sous Chef is that it made a slightly looser mayonnaise than the Cuisinart Custom 14 and the mini processors we tested. Also, its mini bowl insert did not chop almonds evenly, so we recommend using its 16-cup bowl for this task. We read a few reviews by people who disliked how the Cuisinart Custom 14’s lid locks with the feed tube in the back rather than in the front (which is standard for most models).
If you’re a cook who needs to get dinner on the table quickly, a food processor can feel like an additional pair of hands in the kitchen. It will allow you to prep a range of food—whether you’re grating cheese, chopping nuts, slicing vegetables, or kneading dough—at lightning speed. We’ve been testing food processors since 2013, and we remain convinced that the simple, sturdy, and powerful Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor is the best choice for most home cooks. The Cuisinart® Elite Collection™ 4 Cup Chopper/Grinder handles food preparation such as chopping, grinding, and puréeing effortlessly, making your kitchen tasks easier. The superior BladeLock™ System feature keeps you safe by securing the blade in place during processing and pouring.
Ninja, KitchenAid, and Cuisinart are usually dishwasher-safe and easy to clean. 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. In terms of pure performance, the Breville Sous Chef 16 Pro was hands down the best food processor we tested.
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.
For small chopping tasks, the inexpensive KitchenAid 3.5 Cup Food Chopper offers the best value and performance we’ve found in a mini processor. This machine is a good supplement to a full-size model, or it’s a great alternative, if you don’t want to spend a lot. In our tests, this processor even performed better than the mini bowl attachments that come with some of the larger processors.
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. 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.
This processor would be ideal for making baby food, thanks to its small size and effective pureeing capabilities. More convenient than ever, the Cuisinart Elemental Collection 4-Cup Chopper/Grinder effortlessly handles a variety of food Preparation cuisinart toa60 tasks such as chopping, grinding, and pureing. The SmartPower blade has a patented auto-reversing ability with a sharp edge for delicate chopping and pureeing soft foods, while the blunt edge grinds through spices and harder foods.
This is one of Cuisinart’s most basic models, but it consistently chops, slices, and kneads better than any other food processor we’ve found for under $250. This tool has two speeds for chopping, mixing, pureeing, and even whipping cream. It includes a multipurpose blade for chopping and blending, along with a whisking accessory.
The Cuisinart Complete Chef chops, slices, and cooks food all in one 18-cup stainless steel bowl (it comes with attachments and built-in recipes for cooking things like risotto or beef stew). We were eager to see how it would compare to the Thermomix (a wildly expensive blender that cooks, and which has something of a cult following outside of the US), but we weren’t able to get it to work. We probably just got a lemon, but that doesn’t bode well for a $700 appliance (at the time of this publishing). An error consistently appeared on the screen each time we attempted to run it, even when the correct lid and blade attachment were in place.