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The Best Food Processors

Our longtime favorite is powerful and easy to use, but is it still the best choice?

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Last Updated Mar. 25, 2024. Appears in America's Test Kitchen TV Season 22: Quick Fish Dinners

The Best Food Processors
Update, March 2024

We tested a few new food processors. Our overall winner remains the same, but we now also recommend a larger option with more accessories, the Breville Sous Chef 16.

See Everything We Tested

What You Need To Know

Our top-rated food processor is the Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor. Powerful, precise, and compact, it takes up less space than most food processors despite having one of the largest capacities, all at a moderate price. Its smooth, simple bowl and blade design make it easy to handle, monitor during use, and clean. The motor is quiet, and the machine operates with just two control levers and three essential blades for chopping, shredding, and slicing that can all be stored inside the bowl, with no accessories box to deal with. (Additional blades are available separately.) For those who want all the bells and whistles and are willing to pay for and store them, we also recommend a strong performer, the Breville Sous Chef 16, which comes with a mini bowl and many more accessories, including a french fry slicer and the option to add a dicing kit. 

If you are interested in a tool that will chop and mix small quantities, check out our review of small food processors

What You Need to Know

A good food processor makes a huge range of recipes faster, easier, and more approachable. It’s excellent for making salsa, pesto, and other chunky sauces. It’s perfect for big-batch cooking, grating pounds of carrots, zucchini, or potatoes to spare you the labor—and shredded fingertips—of a box grater; and slicing as quickly as a professional prep cook. It cuts cold fat into flour so you get the flakiest pie crust. It kneads pizza dough and even shreds cheese and purees sauce to top that pizza. Not to mention that it chops onions, makes bread crumbs, minces herbs, grinds beef into hamburger, and even whips up frosting or fresh mayonnaise in a minute flat. 

How Food Processors Work

All the models we tested use the same approach: A workbowl sits on a motorized base, and a blade sits in the bowl on a central stem that passes through the bowl to the motor. Safety features keep the blade immobile if the lid isn’t fully attached. You add food to the bowl and put the lid on. Press a button, and the motor spins the blade, chopping your food. For slicing and shredding, you swap the primary blade for a horizontal, disk-shaped blade. The disk has either raised holes for shredding or a raised cutting edge for slicing. After securing the lid, you add food through the lid’s vertical feed tube, steadily pressing it down with a special feed-tube pusher onto the spinning disk. The feed tube can usually be modified with special inserts to hold bigger or smaller foods upright. This helps the machine shred or slice uniformly. 

Surprisingly, while all our machines worked on these principles, they performed differently and took varying level...

Everything We Tested

Good : 3 stars out of 3.Fair : 2 stars out of 3.Poor : 1 stars out of 3.
*All products reviewed by America’s Test Kitchen are independently chosen, researched, and reviewed by our editors. We buy products for testing at retail locations and do not accept unsolicited samples for testing. We list suggested sources for recommended products as a convenience to our readers but do not endorse specific retailers. When you choose to purchase our editorial recommendations from the links we provide, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices are subject to change.
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Reviews you can trust

Reviews you can trust

The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing. We stand behind our winners so much that we even put our seal of approval on them.

Lisa McManus

Lisa McManus

Lisa is an executive editor for ATK Reviews, cohost of Gear Heads on YouTube, and gadget expert on TV's America's Test Kitchen.

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