My most prized kitchen appliance is my small-but-mighty KitchenAid cordless chopper. For the past nine years, I’ve used this little food processor to blend, mix, chop, and purée everything without being tethered to an outlet. In fact, I used this five-cup wonder — the standard Cuisinart holds 14 cups, in comparison — to develop every recipe for my cookbook, Big Dip Energy, a few years ago, making at least a dozen dips a week with it.
This machine has about the same footprint as a blender, but it’s shorter and weighs only 2.8 pounds. It can be quick charged in ten minutes or fully charged in less than two hours. The device has a run time of at least 25 continuous minutes — or can chop up to 40 onions, according to the manual — but it seems like it might last longer than that, given that I only charged it once a day while working on four or five recipes over eight-plus hours a few times a week. It never died while I was in the middle of whipping silken tofu and roasted eggplant into Miso Eggplant Dip, puréeing confit alliums into a paste, or blitzing romaine lettuce into the base of Caesar Salad Dip. The machine had no issues blitzing hard items like nuts, Oreo cookies, and graham crackers into crumbles in seconds. And when I’m making soup, stir-fry, or salads, I often use it to mince carrots and onions quickly.
