Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10

A friend asked what food processor I bought and was I happy with it. So here's my answer.

I bought the Kitchenaid KFP710 at Target.

On the plus side:

• It's a Consumer Reports Best Buy.
• It costs $90 - which I appreciated because I wasn't ready to commit to a $200 appliance I wasn't sure I would use.
• It's easy to clean. (I had a Cuisinart briefly 10 years ago, and it seemed hard to clean the feed tube on that brand.)
• It works great.
• You can wash everything in the dishwasher (except the base - duh).

On the minus side:

• It's a 7-cup bowl, and sometimes I wish I had a bigger one. Of course, it's not like I have counter space for a bigger one. And I'm definitely glad I'm not trying to store extra food processor bowls, which some of the more expensive models come with.
• They don't make extra blades for it (which they do for the 9- or 12-cup models). It comes with a metal chopping blade and a disk that does grating and 2mm slicing. Now I'm used to it and those blades work well for me, but initially I wished I had a disk that did 4mm and 6mm slicing. 2mm slicing is pretty thin for something like carrots.
• It doesn't have a little insert bowl for chopping small amounts of things - but honestly, I can't think why I would want that.
• Parmesan cheese is too hard for the grating blade - it just ends up pulverizing it, rather than shredding it. And if I recall, it sometimes sounded like it was laboring to deal with the Parmesan cheese. I just went back to grating Parmesan by hand. I never tried grating mozzarella in it, but I suspect it might have a hard time with that as well, because of the smooshing aspect.
  
• The blades are freaking sharp. Kind of terrifying. I cut my finger on the grating blade early on and it gave me great respect for the blades. Because I have kids, I actually store the blades in a plastic box on top of the cabinets (along with my Microplane grater which I use for Parmesan cheese). I would definitely not store them in a drawer that you have to fish around in. Of course, sharp blades means it works better - you just have to be careful.

I especially like the food processor for

• slicing greens (kale, chard, cabbage). If I do it by hand I end up with big chunks. With the food processor, the texture of my dishes is much improved, plus it's fast.
• grating zucchini or carrots
• making salsa
• mixing together cold butter and flour for the beginnings of pie crust, hot cross buns, other breads
• chopping onions, though if I just have 1 onion to chop I typically do it by hand.
  

Kitchenaid 7-Cup Food Processor KFP10
Available from Target