What do you use your food processor for?

[NosyNorahsNeighbour]

I'm not really a cook. I'm hoping to start doing more cooking soon. I have a magimix gathering dust and I should probsbly try to use that. What sort of thing do you use yours for? It's just me and one adult DC at home.

Breadcrumbs and hummus 😆

Same as yours, it gathers dust for me

Smoothies, soups, dips, sauces, pesto

Soup(to blend it after cooking), pastry, cakes, and can't remember the rest.

Slicing super slim potatoes at speed for duaphioise, grating carrots for carrot cake, making pastry, crumble, breadcrumbs, hummus...

use mine a lot but one day I just started to make breakfast pancake batter in it by weighing the ingredients straight in blend then in the pan and fridge the jar if any left. It’s not a fancy idea but we now have pancakes for breakfast weekly 👍Kids love it

Mixing pizza dough with the dough attachment

I quite often buy a load of the reduced veg and blitz it with a tin of tomatoes for a pasta sauce. Great to get veg into little ones. Otherwise... hummus and cake batter!

My mam uses one

Grating cheese eg for cheese savoury or cheese and onion flan or a quiche

Grating carrots and cabbage and onion for a real coleslaw

Blending up soups

We use ours for all sorts of things - soups, sauces, grinding, chopping, etc.

But it's more like a tool that you use once you've started cooking more, if you see what I mean. You can do loads of cooking without it.

If you want to start cooking more, then just start cooking more. You'll eventually get to a point where you want to make things that need a food processor and you'll start using it more. Don't make the food processor the focus... make cooking the focus.

I don't think that wanting to use a food processor should be the motivation to cook. Cook for the sake of cooking and eventually you will use it.

I have one that dices vegetables and chucks them out of a chute into a bowl or pan.

I tend to use it in combination with my InstantPot for batch or speed cooking.

I recently popped into M&S and they had 750g blocks of cheddar reduced to 80p, so I bought four, put them through the dicer and froze it in zip bags for use with pizzas, lasagne, etc.

It's certainly a handy tool to have but, due to the hassle of cleaning, i only really use it when I'm cooking a large amount.

Pastry and crumble mix.
Breadcrumbs.
Some cake recipes (mostly I use a stand mixer for that).
Finely chopping large amounts of onion/carrot/celery for batch cooking bolognese.
Gazpacho.
Lemonade.

Blending soup is much easier with a stick blender.

Thought of another- homemade Nutella!

I can't stand chopping onions so I delegate that job to the processor

Have a cheap one for crumble topping. It’s worth it for that. I also make coleslaw frequently and sauerkraut so I wish I could find its slicer blade. It goes in dishwasher.

Hummus
Chopping onions and veg
Pastry
Cake
Crumble

Breadcrumbs, and chopping onions.

For various reasons I have 4 food processors. And they have been mostly made redundant by the nutribullet for day to day chopping (it's a bit of an art though to chop rather than turn to mush!)
If I'm doing a lot of grating I'll use one. I'm also using the cheaper small one now as easier to clean. I've not used my magimix for years.

I only use my Magimixfor processing large quantities of fruit or veg, such as for making chutney, or freezing garden gluts. Otherwise I use a small one for nuts etc. it sits in the cupboard mostly. Bummer to clean.

Batch cooking, coleslaw, pastry, crumble topping and microwave syrup sponge.

I use mine a lot but when my dc were teens I used to like the slicing function, for thinly sliced cheese, which was stopped in a tub in the fridge for them to use for sandwiches etc. Otherwise they would cut door steps!

Thank you for all the ideas. I was planning to cook more anyway, rather than start cooking just to use the processor. I find it hard to think of things to cook and I would like to use the processor as I have it to hand.

I have a little one and a bigger one

The little one I use for salsa, other dips & sauces or eg Thai paste

The big one I use to make pastry, coleslaw, chicken liver pate, hummus.

I use the KitchenAid for baking and whipping and bread/bread products eg cinnamon buns, meringues, pavlova - not the food processor.

And have a separate small grinder for spices and nuts.

Do you mind sharing the recipe for this? It would be good to stop buying the UPF poison my kids love…

My son found it on the internet- I think TikTok 🙄- so I can’t remember the quantities but the ingredients were hazelnuts, icing sugar, cocoa powder and coconut oil. You blend the nuts until they’re nearly a paste and then add everything else and blend again.
It was very simple and probably comparable in price to Nutella. The only reason I haven’t made it often is I’m trying to lose weight and it wouldn’t help at all!