Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update: 6/26/2014. I've now owned this food processor for 3 years and still love it and the comments in my original review (below) still stand. I would highlight bread making as my favorite activity. I don't have a standard mixer so I use the food processor to mix and knead the bread. I now make 3 baguettes every Monday morning and use them throughout the week because it's just so easy and so fast. Now, a caveat. The plastic cover on my unit is just starting to develop a hairline crack on both sides by the handle and feed tube. I've ordered a new cover from Amazon as I want a spare just in case the original breaks sooner than I would expect. I think I've still got a year or more before the crack is big enough to impact anything, but I really don't want any downtime on what has become the one kitchen appliance I use the most for baking and prep work. The new cover is $60, which seemed pretty reasonable to me, but just wanted other buyers to be aware of this. I've only used the Cuisinart processor so maybe this happens with all brands, maybe I have the one weak cover out of a million, but just wanted to pass along this fyi. The original review continues immediately below. I was planning to buy the Kitchen Aid food processor, but the store was out of the model I had researched. I desperately wanted to walk out of the store with a food processor in hand after fighting traffic in freezing rain for an hour to get there. The Cuisinart FP-14DC Elite was in stock, a bit higher priced than I had budgeted, but it was huge and shiny and promised a tight seal over the 3 working bowls that, putatively, would allow me to process liquids with minimal collateral damage. The Kitchen Aid model I thought I was going to buy had several concerns expressed online about leaks and spills, which may or may not have been accurate. This Cuisinart model had numerous issues posted online about food getting stuck inside of the lid and toothpicks, toothbrushes, power washers, and steam-powered carpet cleaners being required to remove all the little particles. There were also some ancillary comments about the dough blade not picking up all the ingredients and food getting stuck under the blades. Every product has some pluses and minuses when used by a large enough percentage of the population, so I decided to brave the reviews, not let perfection be the enemy of the good, and give it a whirl, or a slice. I spent twelve hours on my birthday making a five course very extended meal for my family with frozen drinks, fruit smoothies, home made peanut butter, peanut butter cookies, turkey pot pie, hummus dips, fried falafal, very low fat turkey burgers ground on the processor, spinach mashed potatoes, shrimp-stuffed homemade ravioli, served with homemade pesto, and all manner of goodies that I couldn't make with any consistency or flair in my old blender. I assumed that a food processor would perform some miracles that the blender just didn't have the oomph to accomplish and so far could not be happier. I can't imagine that I've been cooking for 30 years without one--what a dunce. Given that this new toy is fast becoming my best friend, I wanted to provide this review to allay some of the concerns others may have with two specific issues: cleaniness and dough mixing. All the big issues about cleanliness were associated with the rubber seal around the lid of the machine. The three bowls on this unit nestle together and the spring loaded rubber seal keeps everything in place. The blades lock into the base of each bowl and processed food can be poured out of the work bowl with the blades still in place. From the mixed drinks to the honey flavored peanut butter I had ice, flour, herbs, nuts, and juice flying everywhere and never experienced a problem getting one course cleaned out and the next course loaded up. Many people said that they had to resort to toothpicks to get all the food out of the lid that slipped past the rubber seals. Food particles, particulary parsley and chopped spinach, do slip up past, around, between, and above the rubber seal. However, I found no need to clean this by hand. There are open slots cast into the top of the lid that allow hot water to cascade throughout the lid and down past the rubber seal. Just a quick spray from the sink did 99.9% of the work. The tiny pieces of finely chopped carrots or spinach that slipped between the upper lid and the inner seal flushed away by raining water down on the lid's top while manipulating the rubber ring with your fingertips. The manual suggests just rinsing the whole thing down and throwing it in the dishwasher. But I tend to go on marathon cooking sprees when the family is together for a whole day and I'm not going to run the dishwasher every 30 minutes when I'm cooking 5 to 10 courses. Flushing the lid seemed to take care of the problem so I'm less worried at this point about the online comments regarding the difficulty of cleaning the unit. I may not be processing the same foods as the people experiencing the difficulty, but my limited experience to date suggests that the rubber sealing mechanism in the lid is a big benefit, not a problem. The other issue raised in the online reviews was the effectiveness of the dough blade. I only made a pie crust, a pizza, and some raisen bread, but, here again, I didn't experience the same issues reported by others. I had to scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times to get a dough ball to form and pick up all the flour off the side of the bowl, but this still seemed like massively less work than kneading by hand and throwing flour all over the kitchen while making fresh pasta. Kneading the pasta dough in the machine for a few seconds beats the heck out of the 10 minutes of hand kneading that my cookbook demands. So, I can't speak to all the features (I haven't even taken the shredding blade out of the case), but I did want to address those two issues. People reading about food processors online may be unduly scared off by those two concerns. I'm no expert, but I intend to become one. I have to say, my kids absolutely flipped over the taste of homemade peanut butter and homemade hummus compared to the store bought versions. I can make peanut butter in less time on this machine than it takes me to grab it off the shelf at the store and it actually tastes like peanuts, not some homogenized version of Soylent Green that has had the flavor reinjected chemically after it was all removed in processing. Enjoy.