Breville Paradice 9 Review: This Food Processor Completely Changed How I Cook

Gizmodo

4 days ago

2025
I have a confession: while I love cooking, I hate prepping ingredients. I know, knife skills are an important thing for any home chef to possess, and I do work on it. But the truth is I'm slow, my cuts aren't super consistent, and I find it really tedious. In short, food processors are made for people like me, but while I've used them at my mom's and other people's places, I've never owned one myself, largely because I didn't think I could find a place for it in my small kitchen. The Breville Paradice 9 changed all of that, and now I can never go back.
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The Paradice 9 is a high-end, 9-cup food processor, with a price to match, coming in at $400. It boasts a 625-watt motor, and it comes with a range of accessories that all tuck neatly into a caddy that lives inside the main bowl, which keeps things organized and saves drawer space. The whole thing measures 17.5 x 7.7 x 11.8 inches and weighs just over 15 pounds. It's actually the exact same machine as Breville's Sous Chef 9 ($350), with the only difference being that the Paradice comes with a dicing accessory, which is otherwise $80 sold separately.
Breville Paradice 9
The Breville Paradice 9 is the kind of kitchen gadget you don't know you need until you use it and can never go back to manually prepping ingredients.
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Pros Powerful and sharp for quick, clean cuts
Powerful and sharp for quick, clean cuts Dicing kit works very well and saves time
Dicing kit works very well and saves time Solidly built and good-looking
Solidly built and good-looking Compact size for apartment kitchens
Cons More dicing sizes would be nice
More dicing sizes would be nice Slicing kit sometimes leaves odds and ends stuck or slices unevenly
Slicing kit sometimes leaves odds and ends stuck or slices unevenly Pricey compared to competitors
Of course, it has all of the standard food processor attachments, too. There's an ultra-sharp S-blade for mincing, grinding, and pulverizing. It has a grating disc that's coarse on one side and fine on the other. The Paradice 9 has a plastic blade specifically for mixing dough, and it has a sturdy, adjustable slicing disc that allows you to make even slices from translucent 0.3mm up to 5mm thick (there's a storage position so you don't accidentally slice your fingertips off while cleaning it). All of these accessories, as well as the spindle they attach to, are color-coded and lock securely into their own little cubbies inside the clear storage caddy, which keeps everything organized and accessible. When you want to use it, you just pull the caddy out of the bowl, select the attachment you need, and you're off to the races.
Of course, there's also the dicing kit. Some impressive engineering went into this thing. It has its own lower-gear spindle, which allows it to generate more torque. Above it sits a disc with a grid of 12mm squares, and a sharp blade locks in on top of that. Basically, the blade is dual-action. It forces the food down into the grid, and then it comes back around to slice it off into little cubes. Once you're done, you use a cleaning tool that quickly presses the last bit of food out of the grid, and you're done. The dicing kit has its own holder, which comes attached to the accessory caddy, but it adds a fair amount of bulk to the Paradice 9 when it's just sitting on your counter, so I opted to separate the dicing kit's caddy and keep it in a drawer, which reduces the footprint, makes it look better, and cuts two inches off its height.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the feed chute. Coming in at 4.7 inches across, it's very wide for a food processor this size. That means you have to do less cutting ahead of time because larger fruits and vegetables are more likely to fit. Just cut an onion in half, take off the paper, and it's good to go. It also has a narrower insert, which will give you more stability if you're feeding in something like carrots or celery. The plunger very cleverly doubles as a measuring cup—a nice bonus. The controls for the processor are very straightforward. There's just a power button, a start/stop button, and a pulse button. The pulse works extremely well, starting up the instant you hit it and stopping quickly as soon as you let go, which gives you a lot of control.
It's also worth noting that the Paradice 9 is the little brother to the Paradice 16 ($700), which is an absolute beast of a machine with a 1,450-watt motor, a 16-cup bowl, and two additional grid sizes for dicing. If you're regularly cooking for a large family and you have the space, it might be worth the upgrade, but it requires a lot more counter space and more storage for the accessories (which don't store internally). Living in an apartment with a modestly sized kitchen, though, the Paradice 9 is the perfect size for me, and if I'm making something larger, I can just empty the bowl a little more frequently.
The first thing I did was slice an apple. I cut the core out, set the slicing blade first to 0.3mm, and then 3mm, and within seconds, my apples were sliced. Cuts were even and very clean, so there was virtually no juice lost. A bit of apple got stuck on top of the slicer, usually a chunk of peel, which left it unprocessed, and I got the occasional paper-thin slice, which was likely due to my not pushing down firmly enough, but generally it was pretty perfect.
I tried the slicing disc again with green and yellow zucchini, set to 4mm. It took less than 60 seconds to process all four squashes, and they were almost all perfect circles. I coated them with some oil and rosemary salt, then placed them in a spiral in a Victoria SignatureSoft cast-iron pan and baked them, and it ended up being one of the most photogenic dishes I've ever cooked. If I'd been trying to do that by hand, they would have been very uneven. This felt like a huge win.
The next test was the main reason I wanted to try this thing. I've been making this shaved fennel-apple-dill salad for the last year, and I love it, but it takes forever to make. With the Paradice 9, it took me just a handful of minutes. I ran the fennel hearts and stalks through the slicing disc, nice and thin, then tossed them into my serving bowl. I grated the apples on the coarse side of the disc grater, then added them to the fennel. Afterward, I switched to the S-blade and minced the cilantro, mint, serrano peppers, and dill. Tossed that in with some toasted almond slivers, added some lemon juice and olive oil, and it was done and delicious. I might tweak the thickness of this and that next time, but I was eating the salad for a week, and it took minimal time and effort.
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Next, I tried the Paradice 9 on nut butter. My aunt and uncle had gifted me a two-pound bag of pistachios, which would take me a year to go through, so I decided to sacrifice 8 ounces of them for an experiment (even though they were already salted and roasted, which isn't ideal). I spent an hour shelling them, blanching them to try and get their skins off, and then drying them in the oven. Then I just tossed them into the Paradice 9 with the S-blade and let it rip. It quickly turned the nuts into a consistency of sand, then flour. I added just a teaspoon of avocado oil into the chute, and seconds later, the dry mixture transformed itself into a beautiful, shiny nut butter that was absolutely delicious. I was impressed with how consistent the S-blade is, as I have yet to find a single chunk.
For another big test of multiple attachments, I decided to make a veggie soup. I started out with a traditional mirepoix of a couple of carrots, a few stalks of celery, and an onion. I ran them through the dicer one at a time, and the whole mirepoix was done in less than 45 seconds. Not only that, the little cubes were gorgeous—super consistent with very clean edges. It probably would have taken me 15 minutes to do that by hand, and with inferior results. While that got cooking, I used the S-blade to quickly mince a few cloves of garlic, then used the slicing disc set to 5mm to make short work of a few zucchinis. It was the best-tasting (and prettiest) soup I've ever made.
I also wanted to try the dough attachment, so I took a stab at making naan. Now, I fully confess, I'm not a bread maker. Despite watching every episode of The Great British Bake Off, I've never tried it myself, so it's entirely possible that some of this was user error, but the Paradice 9 struggled here. It mixed the dry ingredients fine, but once I started adding the liquids, things got a bit gummy. It separated into one huge dough ball and then a bunch of little dough bits, and then the motor just stopped. So I followed America's Test Kitchen's advice and switched to the sharp metal S-blade (they recommend that for all food processors). It helped things come together a bit more, but still, after a bit, the motor locked up and it refused to restart. The dough had mostly come together by this point, but it still tore a bit too easily and didn't stretch as much as I wanted. I fried the naan in a Victoria skillet, though, and it still turned out very tasty. I really wanted to put the dicer through its paces, so for my final test, I went with carnival squash and purple sweet potato. I'd never made carnival squash before, so I didn't know that the skin is pretty tough and not great to eat, but that didn't stop the dicer. It tore right through all of them and made a nice, even hash. I was worried the raw, purple sweet potatoes would be too fibrous, but nope! I just tossed the little cubes with a tablespoon of oil and some herbed salt and put them in the oven—and they were perfect.
After each of these tests, I found that cleaning was extremely fast and easy. Usually, I could just use the sprayer in my kitchen sink to knock the bits of food out, put the pieces up to dry, and that was it. That said, almost all of the accessories (except for the dicing set) are dishwasher safe, and they all came through a hot wash unscathed.
Of course, I'd be remiss not to mention the 800-pound gorilla of the food-processor world—Cuisinart. Cuisinart makes very high-quality food processors that seem to last forever (I think my mom's is roughly 30 years old and still going strong), and they're a lot cheaper, too. Its most famous workhorse is the Custom Cup 14 ($250), but the closest competitor to the Paradice 9 would be the Custom Cup 10 ($180). It has a similar footprint, and it's less than half the price, though it has a weaker motor, and the dicing kit would be an additional purpose. I've also been told by friends who own Custom Cup 10 that it doesn't dice very well. Still, if you're not going to be using a food processor that much, it might make sense to spend less.
So, what's the ultimate verdict here? I absolutely love the Paradice 9. I wish you could get the additional grid sizes for the dicer that come with the Paradice 16, because 12mm is just a little smaller than I'd like for home fries, but that aside, it's great. Dicer attachments for food processors are notoriously lousy, but this one works wonderfully, and the powerful motor made quick work of everything I threw at it. The Paradice 9 also looks good on my counter, doesn't take up too much space (thanks to the caddy system), and has a ton of thoughtful details in there. It's not cheap, but its size and features make the Paradice 9 the best food processor you can get for an apartment-sized kitchen.
See Breville Paradice 9 at Best Buy