The Best Food Processor for All Your Kitchen Prep Tasks
Food processors promise a life of simplicity in the kitchen. And the best food processor delivers on that promise. It slices! It dices! It shreds! It makes pie dough and hummus! But depending on which model you choose, what size food processor you want, and the price tag you’re willing to pay, the large base can weigh as much as a small child, and come with such a dizzying array of attachments that ingredient prep feels less like cooking and more like an IQ test. Finding the best food processor for you means considering both its performance and its features—all the ones you want and none that you don’t.
We first reviewed food processors in 2018, putting a small fleet of the beloved appliance to the test to measure efficiency, versatility, and ease with cleaning and storage. Every year since then, we’ve added to the review, pitting past winners against new models to ensure we always have the highest-performing machines listed as our top picks.
The best food processor: Breville Sous Chef 12
With a sturdy build, simple controls, a useful array of attachments, the Breville Sous Chef 12-cup food processor is a high-quality appliance that lives up to its name: It’s the right-hand man you’ve always wanted in the kitchen. This food processor has a 1,000-watt motor and 12-cup dry capacity (8½ cups for liquid). That’s big enough for most tasks and we wouldn’t recommend going any smaller unless you have a really small kitchen and storage space is significant issue (even if it is, a good food processor is maybe the one appliance you should make extra room for). It readily handled every test we threw at it, and the included grater, slicing blade served us well.
Though Breville is not as big a name in food processors as, say, Cuisinart, it is a leader in intelligent design (see, well, a lot of our other product reviews)—and indeed, beyond the Sous Chef 12’s mere power, its assortment of thoughtful, user-driven design tweaks made it stand out from the pack. Sitting snug on the base like a blender, the work bowl is very easy to attach and detach, never leaks, and doesn’t require the latching, turning, and locking that’s common with other brands. Also, from a purely tactile standpoint, all the Sous Chef 12 components feel great in the hand, especially the smooth ergonomic handle on the work bowl and the lid. We also liked how the work bowl is clearly marked with measurements in both cups and milliliters, and how the neat pour spout makes it feel like a nice big measuring cup when maneuvering it from the base to the counter.
The Sous Chef sports a wider “feed chute”—the opening in the top of the lid that you push ingredients through—than many of the other food processors we tried, which makes shredding and slicing easier because you don’t have to precut food into smaller pieces. It’s also one of the quietest machine we tested, and its slicing disc is adjustable from 0.3 mm to 8 mm, upping its versatility.