Some years Back, I conducted a head-to-head test between two of the best food processors on the market. Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor and Breville Sous Chef They are a critics’ favorite, performing superbly which made testing fun. However, there is one extra tricky trick I’ve always wanted to see food processors successfully pull off: dicing. Imagine those hearty meal recipes where you could just shove potato after potato, onion after onion into the chute of a food processor and…boom, boom, boom!—would produce perfect little cubes.
As fun as it sounds, the mechanics of creating a dicing machine are pretty demanding. Food processors with slicing disk attachments are great at slicing food evenly crosswise, but doing it in three planes gets really tricky to engineer. A simplified description of how many manufacturers have tried to do it goes something like this: you push the vegetables down through the chute, then a horizontally rotating blade cuts a slice and pushes it down through a grid of blades.
It sounds great, but it’s very difficult to get working properly and requires a lot of extra parts. With the release of the Breville Paradice 16, I wondered if it was finally time for a manufacturer to get it right.
A lot of accessories
Breville doesn’t mess around when it comes to food processors. Its Sous Chef is a powerful, sleek, and statuesque machine. A Breville rep confirmed that the Paradice is basically a Sous Chef with dicing attachments worth an extra $200. I thought they would work great. Turns out, that was wishful thinking.
The Paradice seems like one of those products a very serious home cook would buy for a milestone birthday, but in reality, the dicing capabilities (the main reason you’d spend a few hundred dollars more on this model instead of the Sous Chef) are absolutely disappointing.
The Breville Paradice 16 arrived in a box almost as big as I could fit myself in. Inside are two large plastic boxes to hold all of your accessories. On the website, they are referred to as “the storage containers for the chef’s arsenal.” Although there is a smaller one 9 cup versionIf you’re short on storage or counter space, this is almost certainly more machine than you can handle.
Photography: Breville
If you have the space, though, it comes with a bewildering array of attachments, all of them sturdy and color-coded to perfection. The capabilities of this machine, which requires no dicing, are impeccable. With its gargantuan 1450-watt motor and handsome design, it’s the luxury car of food processors with the minimalist beauty of a control panel. If you want to make pizza dough or peanut butter—things that might make a lesser-quality machine cringe and smell like melted electronic parts—the Paradice is unfazed.
Along with the S-shaped chopping blade, its height-adjustable slicing disc is a marvel of kitchen engineering that saves space and lets you set the thickness you want. There’s a grating attachment that works like a charm. For smaller jobs, there’s even a mini chopper that fits neatly inside the main bowl. Almost all parts are dishwasher safe. I also take every opportunity I get to plug in the Breville’s wall plug, as it has a finger hole that makes unplugging a breeze.
The kiss of death
Despite all this, the thing you struggle with the most is the dicing function, and the Paradice doesn’t dice very well. It just doesn’t do it. I had a whole list of fun dishes to make, like homemade fries, summer vegetable lasagna, vichyssoise, and minestrone. I tried them all diligently, but I learned everything I needed to know on the first onion I tried it on.
I peeled and quartered it to make sure the chute was loaded properly, then leaned on the pusher and watched. The machine chopped about two-thirds of the allium, then spread the last third evenly over the dicing grid and on top before it got stuck. Breville seems to have planned for this, as the Paradice comes with special tools for unclogging the grids, which is a strange and time-consuming solution. Ultimately, I skipped this step, pulled out the dicing grid, inverted it, and slapped as much of the half-chopped food as I could onto a large cutting board to finish the job with a knife.
