Cuisinart 14, the popular one is awful, and I'd never buy another one.

I'm writing in to weigh in on my first hand experience with this thing, and to serve as a datapoint for people, who like me, were looking for recommendations and feedback on whether or not they should purchase this.

Up until recently, I had a Ninja food processor that had done a few years of good work, but finally the bowl locking mechanism gave out, and it was time to get a new one (I will say that finding replacements parts was impossible, so I was forced to purchase another whole food processor). So I did the usual research, scouring forums and checking out various youtube comparisons, etc. and the popular 14 cup Cuisinart food processor was roundly praised and highly recommended. So I purchased one.

How it's built/Ease of use

Unboxed, set it up, and was immediately vexed by how annoying it was to attach the lid to the bowl. I figured I must've been doing something wrong, because the Ninja I'd had for years was always so incredible easy to detach and re-attach. But nope. The way they've engineered this bowl and lid is just plain bad. For something this expensive and for functionality this basic and routine, you'd think that they'd make sure to get this aspect of the device perfect, and maximally convenient. But it can be a pain in the ass, particularly compared to the Ninja which made removal and attachment very simple and straightforward. It's constructed in such a way that there are these plastic tabs that have to line up just so, and everything's glass-clear so it can be annoying to align and screw together. When it's wet, there can be almost like a bit of friction/suction getting everything to slide together just right. It's not impossible to get on, but it's absolutely more consistently annoying than it should be. This may not sound like a big deal, but contending with this multiples times, every time you use it is absolutely an unwanted headache. And it's offputting to be reguarly irked by something that's supposedly designed to make your life easier and more convenient.

Then there's mounting the bowl to the spinning mechanism, which again, as something you're doing all the time should've been engineered to perfection. But it wasn't, far from it. There's a spindle that goes through the bottom of the bowl and that connects to the spinning S-blade through a long tube at the bottom of the bowl. When you're trying to re-seat the bowl and the S blade mechanism back on the spindle you have to line everything up just right, so that all three things perfectly align. This often requires all sorts of jiggering, adjusting, re-setting the blade, picking the bowl up and trying again, etc. It's a completely baffling design choice. Again, compared to the Ninja I never had to give re-seating the bowl a second thought, but on the Cuisinart it's annoyingly under-engineered and poorly conceived.

Finally, locking the bowl to the base, once you've played Jenga with the bowl, the spindle, and the blade, is inconsistent. Sometimes it twists and snaps into place. Sometimes, it's just got other ideas for whatever reason, and you've got to try it twice, three times, four times, to get it to snap in place.

Every time I use this thing, it's just annoying, and reminds me that it was a bad purchase. I'm sure for many, for whom this is their only machine, maybe the way the thing works seems "normal" and fine. But when you've got a direct comparison, within a few days of each other, it's just a clearly worse and more annoying experience. The whole bowl assembly and the spindle mechanism is just poorly conceived, and makes me not want to use this device. Every time I use this thing there this brief thought: "now I have to deal with this damned thing again." And that's not what you want to be thinking when you've paid well over $200 for an item.

Food processing -- lack of settings

Again, comparing this to the Ninja, which was 40% of the price, the operation is just worse. With the Ninja, there are several buttons: Chop, Puree, Dough, Disc, Low, High, Pulse. The Cuisinart has none of these specific settings. It has "On" and "pulse." That's it. One might be tempted to think that the multiple individual options on the Ninja are gimmicks: "After all, they're all just spinning the blades, so what's the difference?" But not so. The Ninja provided much better control over the size of the chopped items. Large. Medium. Small/fine. And of course liquification. The Cuisinart basically chops everything finely, even when using the pulse function. To add more detail: when using the pulse, the chopping starts off uneven (to me, this is because of the blade design which differs from the Ninja: the Cusinart only has two blades versus the Ninja's 4, so if you've got things randomly thrown in the Cuisinart, the stuff on the bottom, near the blades, gets sliced more often, but there's still unchopped food that's not being touched above the blades), so you've got uneven chopping resulting in some small pieces and some large. To get the large pieces smaller, you of course have to pulse again, and this chops the small pieces even smaller still, while finally eventually chopping the larger ones, so for consistency, you just have to chop it ALL small. Again, a stark contrast here between this and my old food processor, which had two pairs of blades, one placed low, and another placed higher, for more uniform chopping, and the difference in results is obvious.

Having the various settings clearly mattered, and just having "pulse" and "on" doesn't offer the control I'm accustomed to.

Final Verdict

As you probably guessed, I'm not happy with this device, and I'd never buy another one. A lot of people praise its greatness, including America's Test Kitchen, and maybe once you start adding in being able to emulsify or make nut butters or whatever (stuff I don't make) perhaps its utility overshadows its weaknesses, or maybe people have a special place in their hearts for certain flagship appliances "I love my KitchenAid mixer, they've been used in our familiy for decades!" Or maybe it's because of their durability, or maybe they just haven't used anything else for comparison's sake. Whatever the case, whatever accounts for the high praise, that just hasn't been my exerience. I obviously cannot recommend this device, and I'd never buy another one. The actual device vs. the hype surrounding it just don't compare.

3/10.