This $360 food processor is an investment in at-home cooking you’ll never regret

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When Laura Wright, award-winning Canadian food blogger and author of “The First Mess Cookbook,” first started getting serious about cooking, she watched a lot of Ina Garten, hoping to glean some tricks of the trade. Time and time again, she noticed the affable chef pulling out her food processor. If the appliance made cooking easier for the Barefoot Contessa, then surely, Wright deduced, her own kitchen would benefit from one, too. “I was spending so much time chopping, mixing and doing all this other stuff,” she says. “Then I see Ina getting it all done pretty quickly and making cooking look a lot more enjoyable.”

Eventually Wright found her staple machine, the Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor ($361, amazon.ca). What sets the high-capacity kitchen appliance apart from every other food processor she’s tried are the simple paddle switches, one to power the device on, and the other to use the pulse function.

It’s a feature that’s disappeared from most big-name food processors in favour of sleek buttons that Wright finds trickier to use. With this design, the paddles “give so much more control,” minimizing the chances of overmixing whatever you’re working with, she explains. Wright also appreciates that the Cuisinart is incredibly easy to clean, since it doesn’t have too many tiny, hard-to-reach crevices where gunk can build up.

Wright is plant-based, so she’s often whipping up sauces and dips, like her Creamy Kale Pesto White Bean Dip. But she assures that home cooks will get plenty of use out of the gadget, no matter what cuisine they make. Wright powers hers up for a multitude of reasons, including chopping salad veggies with the shredder attachment (hers has “stayed sharp forever”), making nut butters or preparing dough for a rustic galette. One tip Wright picked up from Garten: A food processor will allow you to work with colder butter, breaking it into small uniform pieces that are ideal for pastries.

“This is truly the most functional home food processor I’ve used,” Wright says. “It makes [cooking] so much easier, and it’s so much more intuitive when you’re actually working with it. I use it at least every other day.”