If I had to play the kitchen edition of “what would you bring to a deserted island?” my answer would include a food processor. (I shan’t be taking questions about practicalities such as electricity at this time.) It’s a magical beast amongst countertop appliances, good for shredding, dicing, slicing, and grinding. But my favorite use of all is kneading—a thing the food processor is surprisingly good at, perhaps more so than a stand mixer. Here’s why.
A food processor kneads dough faster
A good, sturdy food processor has a powerful motor, often two to three times stronger than a stand mixer’s. Compare, for instance, the 720-watt motor on the Cuisinart 14-cup food processor (my preferred machine) to the 275 watts of a standard Kitchen Aid tilt-head stand mixer. All this extra power translates to a device that generates a lot of force, creating a dough in a fraction of the time it would take in a stand mixer or by hand. The dough for my Surprisingly Simple Sandwich Bread comes together in under six minutes. Six minutes! You’ve had to wait in line for your morning coffee longer than six minutes.
A food processor can handle tough, firm doughs
Motor strength also comes into play when dealing with dense, firm doughs like for bagels or certain sandwich breads. These stiff doughs are a strain on a stand mixer and might, at best, cause the mixer to jump and shimmy itself across the countertop or at worst, grind down the (often plastic) gears with repeated use, shortening your expensive machine’s lifetime. A food processor though? It looks such doughs dead in the eye and says, “I’m not afraid of you.”
A food processor works well with cold ingredients
As someone who rarely thinks ahead and almost never brings ingredients to room temperature before baking, I doubly appreciate that I can make dough in the food processor with cold or cool ingredients. Food processors work at such high revolutions per minute (RPM) that they create lots of friction, resulting in a surprising amount of heat. My sandwich bread calls for cold water and cubes of fridge-cold butter. In the two minutes it takes to incorporate the butter into the dough, there’s enough heat generated to soften it fully and result in a silky dough with no butter clumps. Dough in a flash without the need to soften butter beforehand is truly top tier.
All told, the food processor remains the reigning champion of my kitchen and my desert island dreams. I reckon a slice or two of soft, impossibly easy sandwich bread will convince you of the same.
Trust the process
If you think you can’t bake bread, this one’s for you. Your food processor does all the hard work, delivering soft, silky dough in under 10 minutes.