I received the
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor as Christmas gift. No,
not from my husband. And yes, I
did ask for it. I was excited to find jobs for it to do. Once I did, I was not impressed and this small chopper. It soon found its way to the bottom shelf of my pantry, where all things in our house go to die. While doing some spring-cleaning I thought about throwing it out, but decided that it may have some value as an epinion. But, to be fair, I figured I needed to give it a full workout. So, this past week of miserable, rainy spring weather gave me a chance to run this mini food processor through its paces.
In and On the Box The box of my
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor says, "Never touch another knife." According to the instructions, "always cut large pieces of food into smaller pieces of even size – about ? inch to a side" Now, maybe the people at Cuisinart get different food than I do, but I don't often run into onions, peppers or cheeses sold in ?" square. Since most of the food I put into the chopper needs be peeled and chopped, the claim of "never touch another knife" seemed more like and boldfaced lie.
While I wouldn't call this an attractive machine, it isn't a bad design either. I prefer a more "retro" design to my appliance and this one has a sleek modern look. The base is a 7 ?" by 5 " white oblong and with the bowl and lid attached it tops out at about 9 ?". This is a nice small appliance.
The 3-cup capacity bowl is clear (as you would expect), has a white handle. The cover is also clear and has small holes to allow you to add liquids while the machine is running. The mini-processor comes with a Cuisinart Smart Power Blade that has two curved blades permanently attached opposite of each other on a central hub. Rounding out the contents of the box is a small 6" long plastic spatula with a ?" wide blade. All of these components are dishwasher safe.
Basics Operation Once you have washed all of the pieces, being careful of the sharp blade you are ready to go. You place the work bowl on the motor base and give it a turn counterclockwise to lock it in place. The blade assembly slips easily over the column in the bowl. Put the food in the bowl, being careful not to overload it. Food should not go higher than about 2/3 of the way up the blade assembly column. Next place the cover on and rotate to lock into place and once the machine is plugged in you are ready to process.
The
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor has two functions, chop and grind. The chop function is used for chopping, pureeing and mixing softer food. For the chop function it is recommended that you use a pulse action. There is no lock feature so pulse it sort of the default process. You need to hold the operating button down for continuous running, which is recommended for the grind feature. Grind is used to process hard foods such as spices, coffee beans, chocolate and nuts. Even when using the "continuous" operation mode you need to pulse every 10 seconds or to allow the food that is stuck to the sides of the bowl to fall back into the path of the blade. You should never run the machine for longer than 1 minute at a time.
Processing hard foods like coffee beans and spices may scratch and cloud the bowl. While this does not cause and performance issues, it isn't aesthetically pleasing. Cuisinart sells extra bowls and lids if this is an issue.
Liquid, such as oil and flavorings can be added while the machine is running. You add liquid to the small reservoir on the cover, being careful to only let the liquid flow into one hole. The other hole must be left clear so air can pass through allowing the liquid to flow smoothly.
A Week of Cooking It was a busy week in the kitchen. I tried to plan a variety of foods that would test out the
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor. I made baby food, quasi-homemade spaghetti sauce, chili-bean salad, sausage stuffing, chicken Kiev, and chocolate chunk cookies.
Stuffing First up was the stuffing to go with our Easter turkey dinner. Yes, I know it' not traditional, but as chief cook and bottle washer around here I was in the mood for Thanksgiving food. For my stuffing I need chopped onions, celery and pecans. So I peeled the onion, cut it into the requisite ?" chunks and gave the onion a whirl. About 6 quick pulses later I had a mostly finely diced onion. There were still some pretty big chunks that I had to fish out. As I was scraping the bowl to get the onions out I noticed that some of the onion on the bottom of the bowl was rather mushy. I am sure this has to do with the fact that you really cannot cut onions into uniform pieces. Since onions are rings no matter what way you cut it you are going to end up with big pieces and little pieces. Overall, it wasn't too bad of a job and it was a lot faster than mincing the onion up myself.
Next I moved onto the celery. By its nature celery is pretty easy to cut into uniform pieces. I am not crazy about celery but it seems necessary in the stuffing. I got much better results with the celery than the onion. I would say that about 99% of the celery was uniformly chopped into very tiny pieces. Now I probably over processed the celery by most people's standards, but I was happy to have really tiny minced pieces of celery in my stuffing.
Next up were the pecans. I buy pecan pieces in bulk so I just grabbed a handful out of the bag and tossed them into the work bowl. YIKES! What a racket! The machine itself is loud enough, but a handful of hard nuts sound like fireworks going off. After 4 or 5 pulses on chop I still had big pieces, some nicely chopped pieces and quite a bit of "nut dust. " So I sifted through the bowl for the chopped pieces and ran the large pieces threw my hand crank nut grinder. I had some trouble getting the "nut dust" out of the bowl since it was on the verge of turning into an
oily sticky mass of pecan butter.
Spaghetti Sauce I started out with a green bell pepper. I carefully cut the flesh into ? chunks and tossed a medium peppers worth of piece into the work bowl. After only 3 pulses on chop, I had pepper chunks that looked like that hadn't even been touched by the blade and I had mush with about 75% of the pepper finely minced. Since it was spaghetti sauce I wasn't overly concerned and after picking out the largest pieces I dumped the whole thing in.
I tried to be a little smarter this time with the onion. I pulsed about 3 times, used the little spatula to scrap the sides of the bowl and gave the onion about 2more pulses. Much better. I got a uniformly diced (not minced onions), There were still a few large pieces and some minced onion, but overall the results were much better.
Finally I was ready to mince up two small cloves of garlic. First I had to peel it, something I am not used to. I normally use a garlic press which means I can throw a whole clove in, skin and all. But I gave the processor a try. I smashed the cloves, pulled away the skin and tossed the heads into the work bowl and started to pulse. And I pulsed, and I pulsed and I pulsed. Nothing. The small cloves sat on the bottom of the bowl while the blades swirled over them. I ended up running the cloves through my garlic press anyway.
Chili-Bean Salad Having learned from the spaghetti sauce I knew enough to process the onion and garlic together, since this recipe only calls for one clove of garlic. I did the pulse, scrap pulse method again and it worked very well. I was able to get a fine mince without getting too much mushy onion goop too.
But the real test in this recipe was the dressing. I normally make it in the blender to ensure the olive oil gets fully incorporated into the rest of the ingredients so it won't separate. The total volume of this dressing is about 1 cup, which should fit easily into the 3-cup work bowl. However I ended up with a dressing shower. The same holes that allow the air to escape and oil to be added also allow the liquid in the bowl to shoot out. Yuck. While the processor did a good job of emulsifying the dressing and it didn't separate once poured over the salad, it made a mess of the kitchen. My blender does just as good and a much neater job at make dressings.
Chicken Kiev I used the
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor to make the herb butter to go inside the chicken. So I dumped in the room temperature butter and the fresh herbs and ran the processor on chop "continuously". I was disappointed with the results. The butter was flung against the side of the bowl and stuck there. The herbs then got stuck to the butter, but they weren't chopped. I had to toss out the mess.
Once I got the bowl cleaned I did use the processor to chop just the fresh herbs. It did a good job on them and I got nice small pieces before it turned to soup. I tend to run of patients when chopping fresh herbs so this was an improvement over doing them by hand.
Chocolate Chunk Cookies What do you do when you kids get too much chocolate for Easter? Chop it up and make cookies of course! Now before you start to grumble about me stealing from my kids, I am talking about my 9-month-old daughter's stash. The child who refuses to eat a scrambled egg unless it has been run through our
baby food grinder is not in any danger of missing the nearly 2 lbs of chocolate heaped on her by well meaning friends and family.
I did my best to chop big bunnies and small chicks into ?" chunks of chocolate. Chopping chocolate with a knife is tough work. I put it on top of the refrigerator for a little while to warm it up and soften it. This made it easier to chop but made a huge mess in the bowl when I went to process it. So then I stuck the chocolate in the refrigerator to get it to harden back up. The processor did an OK job, but really no better than I could have by hand. Having to add in hardening time, I don't think it was much faster. I ended up with chunks and little flakes and they made great cookies but I would have preferred just chunks. And as warned, the hard chocolate did start to scratch and cloud the work bowl a little.
Baby Food The processor makes great baby food, if you are making a large quantity. Since you are essentially trying to make mush you just run it continuously in the chop mode. You don't really have to worry about over processing fruits and vegetables when making baby food. I personally prefer to make just a meal worth of food at a time for my daughter instead of having food around for days at a time. The couple of tablespoons of food that I make don't fill the bowl enough to be properly processed; in fact it ends up not being processed at all.
Test Results Now that I have learned the pulse, scrap, pulse trick to chopping soft fresh vegetables like onions and peppers, I have to say that the
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor does a good job at uniformly dicing and mincing. It is definitely much faster than I can accomplish the same job by hand. But I get much more consistent size results when I use a knife. Of course I do end up with more stuff to clean when using the processor. Not only do I now have the processor components to clean, I still have to wash the knife and cutting board. I do put everything into the dishwasher, but it does take up space. When it comes to chopping vegetables I would say the processor and my knife are nearly tied, with the processor having a slight edge on larger quantities over the knife. Of course when chopping more than two onions, I can pull out my full sized food processor, which does a fantastic job chopping vegetables.
None of the other tasks I ran this processor through gave any better results than my regular method or preparation.
Final Thoughts This testing has saved the
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor from the appliance graveyard. Now that I am over the learning curve, and since it is here and small, I will use it for chopping vegetables. It has actually found a new home on my Lazy Susan, so it is convenient to grab. But when it dies on its own I doubt that I will bother replacing it as it isn't the time and effort saver that I had hoped for.
The processor comes with a small scrapper. It is perfect for get the small pieces of diced food out of the bowl. However there is no place to store the scrapper. Since it is so small it easily gets lost in a typical kitchen draw. Adding a hook to the back of the processor body and drilling a hole in the handle of the scrapper could eliminate this problem.
The
Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Processor comes with an 18 months warranty and the consumer must include a check or money order for $7 for shipping and handling.
Additional Information Cuisinart Customer Service 800-726-0190
Product Website
http://cuisinart.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi/en/item.cgi?cat=food_processors&item_id=DLC-2A
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