Braun Food Processor
My New Year's present to myself this year was a Braun immersion blender / food processor set. Actually New Year's presents for myself aren't a tradition, it's just my excuse for purchasing this product. I'd been keeping it in my Amazon.de cart, and when I saw the price drop to €85 I jumped on it. Now it's up to €116, so you might want to wait and see if it goes down again.
Here's the link to the Amazon.de page.
It's funny when you start cooking in a kitchen with no appliances, you really learn which ones are most important. For example, I've learned that I can live without a microwave oven, which I previously thought would be the #1 most indispensable product. But really, a regular oven is so much more useful, and there's not much a microwave oven can do that other appliances can't do nearly as easily (exception would be melting chocolate or butter - see pic here as example).
Well, it turns out that I also really missed having a food processor. Specifically, it is just so much easier to cut butter into pastry recipes with a food processor. I researched this category a lot, since like with the mixer, a KitchenAid food processor was out of the question. The Braun was highly rated in German tests (Stiftung Warentest), and I'm partial to Braun anyway since it's a P&G brand. I also considered a food processor attachment for my Bosch stand mixer, but it looked way to small, was nearly the price of this whole set, and there's no "pulse" setting on the stand mixer.
Not surprisingly for me, I've only used the immersion blender once in the month I've had this, to make a celery root and apple soup. But I've found that I use the food processor at least once a week. Of course, it was great for making macarons with (tips here), but I've found that I use it for cutting vegetables a lot more as well. I think it's because it's got two julienne cutters which my KitchenAid didn't have. Plus, there's no annoying hole on the bottom of the work bowl as for the KitchenAid or Cuisinart, so you can actually use the bowl like a real bowl. It operates smoothly and not noisily, and because it's smaller, I find it a lot more handy to wash. My KitchenAid 12 cup workbowl was too big to fit in the top rack of my dishwasher, and on the bottom rack it was hard to position in a way that the water could reach it since it was so bulky. Given my small sink and lack of dishwasher, the compact size is even more welcome. Looking at the whole set, I now wonder why the KitchenAid and Cuisinart food processors are so bulky anyway.
I still like my KitchenAid food processor a lot (top rated by Cook's Illustrated), but I really, really like my Braun. Just like I really, really like my Bosch stand mixer. I never thought I would like these European, non-KitchenAid appliances so much!
