Do I Need a Food Processor?

You need a food processor if you regularly do at least a couple of these five jobs: shredding cheese or vegetables in bulk, slicing a lot of produce evenly, making dough, grinding your own nut butter, or blitzing dips and pesto in real quantity. If you do none of them — if your prep is a single onion and some herbs — you do not need one, and a cheap chopper or a good knife will serve you better and take up far less space.

The five jobs that justify one

• Shredding in bulk. A processor shreds a block of cheese or a bag of carrots in seconds. If you shred often, nothing else comes close for speed.
• Even slicing.Uniform potato, cucumber or vegetable slices for gratins, salads and roasting trays — faster than a knife, and safer than a mandoline for large volumes.
• Dough. Pizza, pie and bread dough come together in under a minute in a capable machine. This is where motor power earns its keep.
• Nut butter and thick spreads.Homemade peanut or almond butter, hummus by the batch — jobs a blender struggles with and a processor handles.
• Dips and pesto in quantity.A coarse salsa, a big batch of pesto, a chunky dip — the processor’s wide bowl and blade do these better than a blender, which purees them too smooth.

When something cheaper is the smarter buy

If you only chop small amounts, a food choppercosts a fraction as much and stores in a drawer. If your goal is smoothies and purees, you want a blender, not a processor — we settle that in food processor vs blender. And if you just need soup blitzed smooth, an immersion blender is cheaper and easier to clean. Buy the processor when the jobs above are a regular part of your cooking; skip it when they are not.