Our Favorite Food Processor

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from dicing onions for a dinner that serves eight. Add the shredding for a pan of cheesy potatoes and the chopping for a double batch of salsa, and Mom used to lose the better part of an hour just standing at the cutting board while the kids orbited the kitchen asking when food would happen.

The Cuisinart 14-Cup food processor gave that hour back. The 14-cup bowl is the entire reason we chose it — it handles a full dinner’s worth of chopping and shredding in one go, without stopping halfway to empty a packed bowl into a mixing dish and start over. The blades swap out for different jobs, so the same machine that minces onions also shreds a whole block of cheese in about the time it takes to say it, and that adds up fast when you’re prepping for a table this long.

We looked at a few smaller processors and one mini chopper before committing. The little ones were tempting on price, but Mom knew from experience that a small bowl in a big-batch kitchen just means running it four times, and nobody has patience for that. The Cuisinart is a real investment at $218.45, no way around it, but the metal-solid build and the sheer capacity make it the workhorse we reach for most weeknights. It’s saved enough prep time by now that it’s quietly paid for itself in sanity alone.