Breville Paradise 16 Review: Not a Passable Score

Several years Previously, I did a head-to-head test of two of the best food processors on the market: the Cuisinart Custom 14-Cup Food Processor and the Breville Sous Chef, critically acclaimed products that performed so well they were a joy to test. But there was one incredibly difficult trick I wanted a food processor to pull off: dicing. Imagine a recipe for a hearty meal where you just have to cram potatoes, onions, and more into the processor chamber.Bang, bang, bang— creating perfect little cubes.

While that sounds fun, the mechanics of making a dicing machine are extremely difficult. Food processors with slicing disc attachments are great at slicing foods evenly horizontally, but slicing on three planes is an incredibly difficult design to do. Here’s a simplified explanation of how many manufacturers have tried to do this: Vegetables are pushed down a chute, sliced ​​by horizontally rotating blades, and pushed through a grid of blades.

This sounds great, but it’s incredibly difficult to get working properly and requires a ton of fiddly extra parts. The release of the Breville Paradise 16 has me wondering if it’s finally time for manufacturers to really make this happen.

Wide range of accessories

Breville doesn’t skimp when it comes to food processors; their Sous Chef is a powerhouse of sculpted luxury. A Breville rep told me the Paradise is basically a Sous Chef with an extra $200 worth of dicing attachment added, which I thought would be fine. But it turns out that this was a bit wishful thinking.

The Paradice seems like one of those products a serious home chef would buy for a milestone birthday, but in reality, the dicing feature (the reason you’d pay a few hundred dollars more for this model over the Sous Chef) is a total disappointment.

The Breville Paradise 16 arrived in a box large enough for me to fold it up and put it in. Inside the box are two large plastic storage boxes to hold all of the accessories; the website calls them “chef’s arsenal storage containers.” There is also a smaller 9-cup version, but if you’re short on storage or countertop space, this machine is definitely more capacity than you can handle.

But if you have the space, it comes with an amazing variety of attachments, all of which are durable, color-coded, and convenient. The non-dicing capabilities of this machine are impeccable. With a monster 1,450-watt motor and beautiful design, this machine is a food processor extravaganza with a minimalist aesthetic to the control panel. If you want to make pizza dough, peanut butter, or anything that makes lesser machines flinch and smell like melted electronics, the Paradise won’t budge.

The S-shaped chopper blade, plus the height-adjustable slicing disc, is a space-saving marvel of kitchen engineering that lets you adjust it to your desired thickness. The shredder attachment works fantastically, too. For smaller jobs, there’s also a mini chopper setup that fits perfectly in the main bowl. Nearly all parts are dishwasher safe. And because the Breville’s wall outlet has finger holes for easy unplugging, I keep it plugged in whenever I can.

Kiss of Death

Despite all this, what you’re spending more on is the dicing feature, and the Paradise doesn’t dice very well. Well, not very well, anyway. I had a ton of fun dishes I wanted to make: home fries, summer veggie lasagna, vichyssoise, minestrone. I dutifully tackled them all, but I learned everything I needed to know the first time I chopped an onion.

I peeled and quartered the leeks, checked to make sure they were set neatly in the chute, then leaned over the dicing device to watch. The machine chopped about two-thirds of the leeks and spread the remaining third evenly over the cutting grid before it got jammed. Breville seemed to have anticipated this, and the Paradise comes with a special tool for unclogging the grates, but it’s a strange, time-consuming workaround. In the end, I skipped this step and just pulled out the dicing grid, flipped it over, and slammed the halved ingredients onto the largest cutting board I could, finishing them off with a knife.