A few years back, I did a head-to-head test between two of the best food processors on the market. The Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor and the Breville Sous Chef are reviewer favorites, wonderful high-performance machines that made testing a pleasure. But there is one particularly difficult trick that I have always wanted to see food processors pull off successfully: dicing. Imagine those big meal recipes where you just cram one potato at a time, one onion at a time into the feed tube of a food processor and—boom, boom, boom– perfect little cubes would be created.
As funny as it sounds, the mechanics of a dicer are pretty sophisticated. Food processors with slicing disc attachments do a great job of slicing food evenly across the board, but doing that on three levels is really difficult to engineer. A simplified description of how many manufacturers have tried is something like this: push your vegetables through the chute, then a horizontally rotating blade cuts off a slice and pushes it down through a blade grid.
While that sounds great, it’s insanely difficult to get it to work properly and requires a ton of extra parts. With the release of the Breville Paradice 16, I wondered if it was finally time for a manufacturer to really get it.
A wealth of accessories
Breville doesn’t take half measures when it comes to food processors. Its Sous Chef is a beautifully designed and luxurious powerhouse. A Breville representative confirmed that the Paradice is essentially a Sous Chef with $200 worth of extra dicing attachments. I thought they would work great. That was a bit of wishful thinking, though.
The Paradice seems like the kind of product that a very serious home cook would buy for a milestone birthday, but in reality, the dicing features—the only reason you’d spend a few hundred dollars more on this model than the Sous Chef—are extremely disappointing.
The Breville Paradice 16 came in a cardboard box almost big enough for me to fold myself into. Inside are two large plastic storage boxes for all the accessories. The website calls them “the chef’s storage bins.” There is a smaller 9-cup version available, but if you’re short on storage or countertop space, this is almost certainly more machine than you can handle.
Photo: Breville
If you have the space, though, it comes with a bewildering array of accessories, all of which are sturdy and, conveniently, color-coded. This machine’s non-cubing capabilities are impeccable. With its monstrous 1,450-watt motor and beautiful 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 can make a lesser machine falter and smell like melting electronic parts, the Paradice is unflappable.
Along with the S-shaped chopper blade, the height-adjustable slicing disc is a space-saving marvel of kitchen engineering that allows you to set the thickness you want. There’s a grater attachment that works wonderfully. For smaller tasks, there’s even a mini chopper that fits neatly into the main bowl. Almost all of the parts can go in the dishwasher. I also take every opportunity to plug in Breville’s wall plug, as it has a finger hole that makes pulling it out a breeze.
The Kiss of Death
With all that said, you’re spending more for a dicing feature, and the Paradice doesn’t dice very well. It just doesn’t do it. I had a whole list of fun dishes I wanted to make, like roasted potatoes, summer vegetable lasagna, vichyssoise, and minestrone. I worked through them all religiously, but I learned everything I needed to know from the first onion I threw through the Paradice.
I peeled and quartered it to make sure the feed chute was properly filled, then leaned on the pusher and watched. The machine chopped about two-thirds of the allium, then evenly distributed the final third over and into the top of the dicing grid before jamming. Breville seems to have planned this, as the Paradice comes with special tools for unclogging the grids, which is a weird, time-consuming workaround. Eventually I skipped that step, pulled out the dicing grid, flipped it over, and slammed as much half-chopped food as I could onto a large cutting board to finish the job with a knife.
