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 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.
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 accessories can be stored inside the chopper, and a case is included to keep everything neat and clean in storage.
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 cuisinart air fryer oven 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.
This processor would be ideal for making baby food, thanks to its small size and effective pureeing capabilities. Breville clearly put a lot of thought into other design elements as well. 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?).