The Breville Paradice 16: A Food Processor With a Dicing Problem
For years, food processors have been a staple in kitchens, offering a fast and efficient way to chop, slice, shred, and even puree ingredients. But one challenge has remained elusive: dicing. Imagine the convenience of simply throwing vegetables into a food processor and having it churn out perfectly uniform cubes – a dream for any home cook. While several manufacturers have attempted to conquer this culinary feat, the results have been, at best, uneven. The release of the Breville Paradice 16 promised to finally deliver on this long-awaited aspiration. However, after extensive testing, it becomes clear that the Paradice, while a powerful and versatile machine, falls short in its dicing capabilities.
A Feast of Features
The Breville Paradice 16 is not your typical food processor. This is a machine built for serious cooks, boasting a powerful 1450-watt motor capable of tackling even the toughest tasks with ease. It’s a powerhouse packed with features and accessories, housed in a sleek and stylish design. Breville boasts that the Paradice is essentially its already renowned Sous Chef model, enhanced with an additional $200 worth of dicing attachments. Its impressive array of features includes:
- An Adjustable-Height Slicing Disc: This marvel of engineering allows you to dial in your desired thickness for perfect slicing, saving valuable counter space.
- A Mighty Shredding Attachment: Effortlessly shred ingredients for salads, coleslaw, or even cheese, creating perfectly uniform pieces.
- A Mini-Chopper Attachment: For smaller jobs, the Paradice includes a mini-chopper attachment that resides conveniently within the main bowl.
- Dishwasher-Safe Parts: A crucial feature for busy cooks, making cleaning a breeze.
- A Smart Wall Plug Design: The plug boasts a convenient finger hole for easy unplugging.
The Paradice, armed with its extensive arsenal of accessories, can tackle everything from pizza dough to peanut butter, showcasing its versatility and power. But, ultimately, the primary draw of this machine lies in its dicing capabilities.
The Dicing Dilemma
It is in the realm of dicing where the Paradice falls short. While the machine promises efficient and precise cubes, the reality is far from perfect. Despite optimistic hopes, the dicing feature simply doesn’t deliver on its potential.
The issue lies in the mechanism. The Paradice employs a grid of blades through which ingredients are pushed, creating the diced shape. However, the process is prone to clogging and jamming. The machine often struggles to handle larger pieces of vegetables, leaving them half-chopped and strewn across the top of the cutting grid.
The Paradice attempts to address this issue by including special tools to unclog the grates. However, this solution is cumbersome and time-consuming, requiring the user to repeatedly stop the machine and manually clear the grid. This process can easily turn a simple dicing task into a frustrating chore.
The Verdict: A Powerful Machine With a Dicing Defect
The Breville Paradice 16 is a powerhouse of a food processor, offering a wide array of functions and excelling in its other features. It’s a machine built for serious home cooks who demand speed, efficiency, and versatility. However, its dicing feature is its Achilles heel. The machine struggles to produce consistently diced vegetables and requires frequent manual intervention, rendering the process far less efficient and convenient than promised.
For users seeking a machine that can effectively handle dicing tasks, the Paradice 16 may leave them disappointed. The high price tag, while justified by the machine’s overall capabilities, becomes harder to swallow when considering the shortcomings in the dicing function. Ultimately, the Paradice 16 is a powerful food processor, but its dicing ability is more of a novelty than a true advancement, falling short of the high standard set by Breville’s other products.
For those seriously investing in kitchen equipment, consider whether the Paradice 16’s shortcomings in its dicing performance outweigh its other admirable features. A traditional food processor with a sharp knife might just be a better, more affordable solution for achieving perfectly diced vegetables.
In the world of culinary technology, the search for the perfect dicing machine continues. While the Breville Paradice 16 is a welcome addition to the home kitchen, it falls short in one key area. Perhaps, in the future, manufacturers will finally be able to overcome the engineering challenges of creating a food processor that truly delivers on the promise of effortless dicing. Until then, home cooks may have to rely on their trusty knives for those perfect cubes.
