Just a few years again, I ran a head-to-head check between two of the perfect meals processors available on the market. The Cuisinart Customized 14-Cup Meals Processor and Breville Sous Chef are vital darlings, splendidly excessive performers that made testing enjoyable. But there’s an extra-difficult trick I’ve at all times wished to see meals processors pull off efficiently: dicing. Think about these big-meal recipes the place you would simply stuff spud after spud, onion after onion down the chute of a meals processor and—whump, whump, whump—it could churn out excellent little cubes.
Enjoyable as that sounds, the mechanics of making a dicing machine are fairly demanding. Meals processors with slicing-disc attachments are nice at evenly slicing meals crosswise, however doing that on three planes will get actually tough to engineer. A simplified description of what number of producers have tried to do it’s one thing like this: Press your veg down via the chute, then a horizontal-spinning blade cuts a slice and pushes it down via a grid of blades.
This sounds nice, nevertheless it’s loopy laborious to make it work effectively and requires a cumbersome quantity of additional components. With the discharge of the Breville Paradice 16, I puzzled if the time had lastly come for a producer to essentially nail it.
A Wealth of Equipment
Breville doesn’t fiddle in terms of meals processors. Its Sous Chef is a sculpted and luxe powerhouse. A Breville rep confirmed that the Paradice is actually a Sous Chef with an additional $200 price of dicing attachments. I assumed they’d work nice. This seems to have been a little bit of wishful considering.
The Paradice looks as if a kind of merchandise {that a} very severe house prepare dinner would purchase for a milestone birthday, however in actuality, the dicing capabilities—the entire motive you’d spend an additional few hundred {dollars} for this mannequin over the Sous Chef—are totally disappointing.
The Breville Paradice 16 arrived in a field nearly big sufficient to fold myself into. Inside are two giant plastic storage bins for all of its equipment. On the web site, they’re known as “the chef’s armory storage containers.” Although there’s a smaller 9-cup model, if you’re brief on storage or countertop house, that is nearly definitely extra machine than you possibly can deal with.
{Photograph}: Breville
Nonetheless, when you have the room, it comes with a bewildering number of equipment, all of that are sturdy and are available helpfully color-coded. The non-dicing capabilities for this machine are impeccable. With its monster 1,450-watt motor and good styling, it’s the luxurious automobile of meals processors with the minimalist fantastic thing about a management panel. If you wish to make pizza dough or peanut butter, issues that may trigger a lesser machine to quail and odor like melting digital bits, the Paradice is unflappable.
Together with the S-shaped chopper blade, its adjustable-height slicing disc is a space-saving marvel of kitchen engineering that permits you to dial in your required thickness. There is a shredding attachment that works splendidly. For smaller jobs, there’s even a mini-chopper setup that matches proper inside the principle bowl. Nearly each half can go within the dishwasher. I additionally take each probability I can get to plug in Breville’s wall plug, because it has a finger gap that makes unplugging a breeze.
The Kiss of Demise
Regardless of all this, what you’re spending extra for is a dicing function, and the Paradice can’t cube very effectively. It simply would not. I had an entire record of enjoyable dishes to make, like house fries, summer time vegetable lasagna, vichyssoise, and minestrone. I dutifully labored my manner via all of them, however I discovered all the things I wanted to know on the primary onion I ran via it.
I peeled and quartered it to guarantee that the chute was correctly loaded, then leaned on the pusher and noticed. The machine chopped about two-thirds of the allium, after which form of unfold the final third evenly over and into the highest of the slicing grid earlier than it jammed. Breville appears to have deliberate for this, because the Paradice comes with particular instruments to unclog the grates, which is an odd, time-consuming workaround. Finally, I skipped this step, pulled the dicing grid out, inverted it, and whacked as a lot half-chopped meals as I might out onto an enormous slicing board to complete the job with a knife.
