Today I bring you news of the Breville Sous Chef Food Processor, which my wife and I recently put to the test. This might just be the best food processor in the history of food processors! OK, that may or may not be the case, but I’m going to tell you right up front that I really like this machine! If you’d like to know why read on and I’ll tell you all about the many great features and benefits of this amazing Breville food preparation system.
Appearance: I’m happy to report that the Breville Sous Chef Food Processor is a highly attractive piece of equipment! With its silver base and see-through processing bowl, it really looks and feels like something a professional chef would use in an industrial kitchen setting.
It’s also big (18 inches high by 9” wide and 10.5” deep), heavy (with a die cast metal base section that weighed in at around 15.5 pounds when we tossed it on our scale [Don’t drop this thing on your foot!!] and 2 solid, plastic, BPA-Free bowls of differing sizes), and it feels extremely solid as well. Its feel certainly matches its look! It also takes up a good bit of space in your kitchen, but that’s really not a bad thing for an appliance that can take the place of 2 or 3 others on your countertop. The Breville Sous Chef is essentially a mixer, a blender, and a chopper—a true all-in-one device!
Another great aspect of the Breville’s appearance is the stylish and organized look of its convenient storage container. This container, with a hinged, see-through lid / upper half, holds all of the Breville’s blades and discs whenever they’re not in use. It keeps everything very well organized and looks sharp in the process—take a look at the photo at right. You can either keep this food processing tool-kit directly adjacent to the processor itself on your countertop, or store it away in another convenient location. Either way, this accessory storage container turns your Breville Sous Chef Food Processor into a complete kitchen preparation set. It also helps to complete the Breville’s overall feeling of professional level quality—a characteristic that the entire set absolutely exudes.
Features & Specs
The Breville Sous Chef Food Processor is certainly not lacking in features. Among them are the previously mentioned mixing bowls (a smaller one with a 2.5 cup [600 ml] capacity and a larger one with a 16 cup [or 3.8 L] maximum capacity). The small bowl is perfect for smaller, family sized meals, and the larger one will very likely process enough food to feed an entire army! OK, that wasn’t true! Several other pieces are also included, such as a Mini Blade, a Dough Blade, a Cleaning Brush, and a Plastic Spatula.
There’s also a Variable Slicing Disc with 24 different thickness settings (for slicing your ingredients anywhere between 0.3 and 8.0 mm), 4 other specialized Cutting Discs (one of which is specifically designed for making French Fries—the others include a Julienne Disc, a Reversible Shredding Disc, and a Whisking Disc), a conveniently retractable power cord (with 110-120 Volts of power capacity) in the motor housing / base section, an extra wide (5.5 inch) feed chute (to easily handle larger pieces of food without having to pre-chop everything), and a 1200 Watt motor that features an amazing 25 year guarantee!
The rest of the system features a limited 1 year parts and 1 year labour warranty. For safety there’s a safety locking system (which, as my wife and I learned, will not allow the Breville to run if the processing bowl is locked in in the backwards position) and non-slip (gripping) feet so the processor doesn’t slip & slide around (or off of) your kitchen counter. There are other features as well, but I think you get the idea—this thing is loaded!
Testing
Our testing of the Breville Sous Chef Food Processor included making French Fries (see above for a side-by-side before and after), salsa (images further down page), and cookie dough (not shown). The french fry test obviously used the French Fry Cutting Disc, the salsa test made use of the S (for Salsa?) Blade, and the cookie dough test employed the Dough Blade.
All up, each of these tests came off brilliantly and extremely FAST! An entire large potato was reduced to chips in about one second flat—no joke! My wife was impressed that the Salsa wasn’t turned to mush as well. The bits of tomato, etc. were mostly uniformly cut (with only the occasional larger piece being left intact) and we enjoyed a good bit of it with a bag of salty tortilla chips! I would have to say that the testing proved highly successful with the Breville Sous Chef, and everything turned out delicious! (Learn more in the evaluation section below.)
Cleanup
Cleanup of the Breville Sous Chef is a bit of a mixed bag. Its plastic parts, for example, are technically dishwasher safe, but Breville wants your appliance to last for years and therefore does not recommend doing so very frequently. The tremendous heat and corrosive soap used in a dishwasher are hard on any plastic surface and may start to scratch and dim the bowls. The steel blades are likely a bit tougher in this respect, but they too should be hand washed whenever possible. As my wife says: “Any good knife [or steel blade] should ideally be hand washed and dried immediately.” Even so, the Breville Sous Chef is overall a reasonable cleanup. If you get to work immediately, a good rinse will mostly do the job. But, just like with anything else, if you let it set for too long, the food will begin to dry up and stick fast, and cleanup will become more of a chore.
Evaluation
What can I really say here? The Breville Sous Chef performed exceptionally well in every respect, which is pretty much exactly what I expected of it. I was entirely confident in the machine from the moment I opened the box and felt how hefty and solid it was, and it was every bit as successful as I expected!
It does its job extremely fast, it doesn’t make an excessive amount of noise, and although it does take up a decent amount of space, it 100% earns its place on the kitchen counter!
Conclusion
My final thoughts are these: I highly recommend the Breville Sous Chef Food Processor! It may well be the best kitchen appliance I have had the privilege of testing thus far. If you’re in need of a new food processor, you really can’t go wrong with this one. While I usually conclude that a given product will probably be a good fit for some and maybe not for others, I really can’t say that today. Anyone that does any kind of food preparation whatsoever is sure to benefit from a machine like this. Again, highly recommended!
From what you’ve read above, do you think you’re more inclined to agree or to disagree with me? Maybe you’ve already got one of these and can offer the benefit of your own personal experience with it? Either way, I’d love to hear from you below. Let me know what you think about the Breville Sous Chef Food Processor! Oh, and you may want to watch the embedded video below as well. It’s very informative!
