Product Review: The Breville Sous Chef 12 – The Best Food Processor On The Planet!

The Breville Sous Chef 12 is your machine if you want to cut time on chopping (pardon the pun). This machine acts as your sous chef (quite literally) – helping you get menial tasks done in half the time required.

Being a vegan, and especially a high raw one at that, my life revolves around fruit and veggies – and that means a lot of chopping. So when I received the Breville Sous Chef in the mail, I couldn’t wait to discover the time-saving mechanism inside. And it was a life-changer!

This beautiful machine contains a 12 cup dry/8.5 cup wet capacity, and it weighs around 16.5 lbs. One of my favourite features is that all plastic parts are made of BPA-free materials (which is important to me, because BPA is super harmful to the human body, and I am very sensitive).

The power behind this machine is also something to take note of. I’ve used food processors in the past, but none as powerful as this beast. It has a 1000 watt motor, a size found in many restaurant food processors. Because of this, the machine is pretty heavy, but 100% worth it. It is easy to use and pretty simple to clean – there aren’t any tiny crevices where stuff can get stuck, which happened very often with my previous food processor.

The machine is also very quiet, and has the ability to process food items in mere seconds. What would take me 10 minutes to finely slice mushrooms takes under 60 seconds with the Breville Sous Chef – and that’s major, in my opinion. I use the machine almost every day, because why would I spend 15 minutes chopping vegetables every night when my “sous chef” can do it for me in under 1 minute!

The unit has three buttons – Power Off, Pulse, and Start/Pause. Lights rim the buttons when you plug in the machine, which is useful to know when the machine is on or off (my past food processor never had this option).

It comes with a few different accessories, like a spatula, micro-serrated S blade, adjustable slicing disc, reversible shredding disk, and a dough blade (for those of you that might make dough). One of my favourite features about this machine is the adjustable slicing disc. Can we all just take a moment to appreciate the genius behind whoever designed the ADJUSTABLE slicing disc. Thank you Breville for being so on top of your game.

The adjustable slicing disc has 8 different levels that you can adjust in one simple turn of the knob, located on the non-slicing side of the disc. This disc is very sharp. Let me repeat – IT IS VERY SHARP. I cut myself on it once, and bled all over my kitchen. This was my fault – so now before I go touching the blade during washing, I make sure to adjust it to level 1 so that the blade isn’t fully exposed.

Aside from cutting myself, the slicing disc is genius. If you want thinner slices, adjust the blade to a lower number. If you want thicker slices, adjust the blade to a higher number. Easy peasy!

The reversible shredding disk is also incredibly useful. It’s like your standard vegetable shredder on steroids. Shred 10 carrots in under 30 seconds! Who woulda’ thought?! The micro-serrated S blade is also very sharp, and very good at pulverizing food items until they become totally enmeshed in one another.

The spatula itself is made perfectly for the bowl. One swoop and the walls will be clean and clear. This is useful for the beginning of processing food items, because sometimes they will stick on the edge. One swipe with the spatula half-way through processing and that’s all you’ll need.

Breville has also included different safety features, so that you don’t slice and dice yourself like I did (haha). If the large shoot pusher, lid and bowl are not perfectly in place, the machine will simply not turn on. The finger hole on the plug also helps you remove it safely from the outlet (how cool is that?). The retractable cord is also so so so incredibly useful for storage. There is nothing I hate more than long annoying cords that swing all over the place. Breville has intelligently allowed for the cord to easily slide in and out of a little storage hole near the back – how convenient!

There are lots of different ways of using the machine. You can chop, grate, and slice, which saves you precious time. You can also use the machine to make doughs, which I have never done, but I have made raw vegan cookie dough before, which works out great, such as the dough I made in this recipe for making the sandwich part of the ice cream sandwich!

The price of the Breville Sous Chef is around $400 Canadian, which converts to around $300 US. It is slightly expensive, but the time and effort it saves you is worth it. Especially if you are someone who is constantly in the kitchen. I’m really excited to discover new ways to use the machine!

In the video below I show how quick you can slice various different vegetables with this machine:

So to make a summary, here are the pros of the Breville Sous Chef:

– very powerful (1000 watt motor)
– so quiet you don’t even realize its working (haha)
– extremely easy to use and clean
– saves exorbitant amounts of time
– adjustable slicing disc – amazing!
– reversible shredding disc
– human-friendly plug that you don’t have to play tug-of-war with

As for the cons, I couldn’t really come up with much, but here are some things you might want to think about:

– heavy machine, and large (17 inches high, 7.5 inches wide)
– very powerful, so has the ability to over-process if you aren’t tending to it when processing food items

But that’s about it! I really have nothing negative to say about this food processor, because I have been using it for at least 5 months and nothing has come up that would have me think otherwise.

• More information: http://www.breville.ca/breville-sous-chef-12.html
• Buy it: Breville BFP660SIL Sous Chef 12 Food Processor, Silver

Disclaimer: All views and opinions are my own. This particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer. However, the manufacturer did give me the product for testing and review purposes.