Is A Food Processor a Luxury Item ?
If you think a food processor is an unnecessary luxury appliance, especially when making sauerkraut, keep reading because I just may change your mind. It makes life easier, and makes the sauerkraut better, and I have a recommendation of one (or two) for you to help you make the best choice.
I always use my food chopper when making sauerkraut. It shreds the cabbage (and carrots, apples, or whatever else I’m using) into pieces that are more uniform in size than I could ever chop. Uniform size is important when fermenting vegetables, because you want everything to culture at the same pace so that the kraut is crunchy throughout, not mushy in parts and hard-as-can-be in others.
Also, this appliance makes the work super-duper fast. I understand that some people may think that chopping vegetables is therapeutic, and I agree, but when I have a lot to do (like when cooking for 5 or more), all that excess time in the kitchen shredding and chopping takes away from time I could be using to make the rest of the meal from scratch and enjoy it with my family.
What’s the Best Food Processor?
In my opinion, the best food processor is a Cuisinart. I have had my Cuisinart (model DLC-2011N) for many years and I used it many times per week. I recently updated to a new one, giving my old one a new home, and love it! I bought the spiralizer attachments to go with it. My model is a 13-cup one:
I like the wide-mouth feed tube, with the smaller tubes nested inside, so I can stack narrower foods like carrots upright in either the wide, medium or small tubes, depending on how many I’m processing, and push only that amount through.
Also, the wide feed tube allows slicing of whole fruits and vegetables like cabbage and squashes, saving me time in preparing the food for processing.
The motor is strong and consistent, and the cutting blade is really sharp!
This Cuisinart food processor has:
- 13 cup large work bowl and 4 cup smaller, inner nested work bowl
- 550 watt peak power motor
- Exclusive patent-pending SealTight™ Advantage System — seals bowl and locks blade
- Supreme® wide-mouth feed tube with small, medium, and large pushers
- Dicing disc with 10mm grid plus cleaning tool
- Stainless steel chopping/mixing blade with patented BladeLock system, including dough blade and small and large S-blades
- Stainless steel reversible shredding disc (fine/medium)
- Stainless steel adjustable slicing disc (0-7mm)
- Electronic touchpad controls—High/Low/Off/Pulse with illuminating blue LED lights
- Accessory storage case (from some retailers)
- Limited 3-year warranty
- BPA free bowls
What Can a Food Processor Do?
A food processor makes it easy to shred cabbage and other vegetables for sauerkraut and its variations. It also simplifies the process of slicing, chopping, julienne-ing, mixing, grinding and pureeing all kinds of foods.
Over the years, I’ve used my food processor to perform all kinds of tasks. A few I can think of in 5 seconds are:
- Make gluten-free dough for breads, rolls and cookies
- Make ‘regular’ dough for breads, rolls and cookies (before I found out I had to be gluten free)
- Chop all kinds of vegetables, fruits, spices and herbs
- Make appetizers such as hummus, dips, applesauce, etc.
- Make homemade baked sweet potato fries (much healthier and much tastier than regular fries). I bought a French-fry blade for this.
- Make spiral "pasta" noodles from butternut squash and zucchini with the optional spiralizer kit
- Shred beets, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables and fruits for raw salads and slaws and for cultured vegetables like sauerkraut
- Chop and finely grind nuts
- Julienne (cut like toothpicks) squash and carrots for stir fries
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