A handy gadget if you need to chop, grind, and otherwise reduce something to smithereens and beyond. But be aware that reviews have often cited the difficulty in cleaning the lid as it doesn’t come apart and food debris and detritus can collect in the the wee groves and inaccessible areas.
I am buying one specifically to chop garlic and ginger for when I cook Indian dishes which call for a ginger-garlic paste to be added to the base gravy.
So no margaritas for moi, at least not in this thing.
@pmarin Interesting? I’ll give you that. A ginger-garlic toned margarita would be interesting, but probably not something one would want to quaff* repeatedly…or often.
Of late, I have been cooking a lot of Indian dishes from curries to dals to paneers to rotis/chapatis to alu masala dosas. Many of the sauces (curries, dals, paneers, etc.) start with an oil based pan gravy. The gravy base uses various whole spices (cumin, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, mustard seeds, etc), onions, garlic and ginger pastes, to which are added tomatoes. Then all of this is cooked down before adding the top ingredients (chicken, beef, dals, leaf pastes of spinach (palak), mustard greens and/or kale (saag), etc.) along with more spices.
For a Western cook, this is a complicated and involved technique using what at first seems like far, far too many ingredients. But once one has created a readily accessible spice and ingredient cupboard, it soon takes on a consistent and understandable pattern.
Organizing, gathering and prepping ingredients for a dish is usually about 70-80% of the effort (aka “mise en place”). The actual cooking and plating accounts for the remaining balance of time spent. As part of mise en place, you clean as you go, so at the end, you have your dish or dishes and very little mess.
Since many recipes call for ginger and garlic, what I have in mind is to pre-make a ginger-garlic paste (equal weights of each) using the small Cuisinart grinder on sale here, then to pack that into small, empty, half and half creamer cups, freeze, and vacuum bag a bunch of the filled cups with a chamber vacuum.
I will be able to get about 8g of paste/cup that way. Then when preparing something, it will be easy to just pop the frozen contents of as many of the cups into the pan as needed.
Though a grinder such as this one, can be cleaned, after being used to make a garlic paste, it will be forever sullied and will likely retain a certain, but faint air about it that would take a margarita into another dimension. A wrong dimension for most folks.
Yes, yes, I know that there are a few drinks and cocktails that use garlic to good effect such as the Desperado (garlic infused tequila, vermouth, olive juice, S&P, and garlic stuffed olives as a garnish), but me thinks garlic tainted margaritas are a step in the wrong direction.
Now, if one is talking about Bloody Mary’s (I prefer 8-Balls with gin), that is a whole other story, except one generally doesn’t need a blender to make them.
*quaffing is a lot like drinking, except one spills more.
A blender is generally only good for liquids because of the shape of the pitcher. Imagine trying to turn graham crackers into crumbs for a pie crust in a blender: the bottom inch would powder and the rest would sit on top. Same goes for onions, you’d get onion pulp at the bottom of a blender with big chuncks on top.
A chopper has wider bowl to allow more physical circulation and usually has blades at two or more heights to keep things moving. Blenders rely on liquids to circulate material through the blades.
The food processor-chopper difference basically comes down to slicing/grating with a top blade and a feeder tube. Let’s say you want to make potatoes au gratin and/or hash browns. The first requires slicing a lot of potatoes, the second grating them. Both is sucky work until you have spent the time to get the muscle memory of a sous chef. This chopper will do neither but a food processor can slice or grate a potato every 10s.
And don’t try to put celery in a chopper. You will get strings, pulp and celery juice. Which, if you were after celery juice, is fine. But a food processor can slice celery into thin, even disks.
I like the red one but I have ZERO counter space. I do kind of resent how colors have been “claimed” by teams, political parties, charities, etc. I just like the color red!
I once used a blender to try and make cranberry sauce. As noted above, the bottom layer liquefied, the cranberries on top just sat there. Being young (27), ignorant, and likely stoned, I shoved a (fortunately) wooden spoon in there WHILE THE BLADES WERE SPINNING.
I found some splotches of cranberry behind the kitchen wall clock when I moved out two years later…
@EvilSmoo Unfortunately, the only liquid my girlfriend and I added was booze… into our mouths. Perhaps a result of working three jobs (one overnight) and some great Thai stick…
@EvilSmoo@MrNews I have the smaller version of this I got here ages ago. I pull it off the shelf once a year at thanksgiving to make cranberry relish. It comes out great and hasn’t exploded once.
Hey can this be used to chop up bodies? Then @yakkoTDI might actually have an empty trunk. And @OnionSoup won’t have to chop up the patio to remove them before they moved - just use this instead and compost the remains. And @rockblossom while I am sure your suggestion would work it would be easier and cheaper to do this than your suggestion to take them and bury them in an unused cemetery corner complete with headstone and flowers.
@Kidsandliz my garbage disposal supposedly is powerful enough to chop up bones. Never wanted to test it out though. Not sure how the septic tank would take to a lot of bones.
@Kidsandliz Nice idea, but skulls and thighbones are destructive to even the most powerful food processors. You need a good-sized wood chipper a laFargo (original movie). A bigger one, like the forestry services use, is even better. But it would be best if you still had a place to bury the output. (I’m quite particular about my compost and never add bones, meat residue, or fats.) There’s also the Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe solution, but you need a cafe.
@brainmist There are things that can be done better in one of these than in a blender. If that’s what you need to do, then yes. I had one. Then I got a Ninja. The Kitchenaid miniprocessor saw no use after that.
We had one that replaced the previous version (KFC3510CU)* that was indispensable in the kitchen but lost in a move. This cuts poorly, the cup is wrong for chopping nearly everything, and the blade is flexible/flimsy.
I donated this version when I happened upon a new-in-box replacement for the old model at the local W/M (of all things) sitting tucked away on a shelf.
*Gotten from Meh (or maybe even Woot back in the day) in an obnoxious watermelon pink, but much loved.
@JWhirly yes. I laughed when I saw it. This one I’m going to have to run past the Mrs. I know she specifically wanted a ninja. I’m also worried this is perhaps more designed for chopping veggies than being a blender.
@JWhirly@OnionSoup Don’t have this but have similar older “choppers” and yes they are relatively small and lightweight and designed to spin a light metal blade. A traditional blender where the base weighs several pounds had a large motor in the base (at least the old good ones did) and would spin a thick heavy-duty blender blade that could crush ice or anything else you put in there (“that’s good bass!”).
Some of the Ninja and other newer designs tend to be able to do both chopping and traditional blending.
@OnionSoup Agreed. I’m wanting more of the bullet/personal size, for quickly mixing protein shakes, then simple cleanup. And our current Ninja of this similar size and ability is working just fine. So another meh.
Got mine delivered last evening. Opened box today. No user guide / manual included. So i just adlibbed to try to open it. i’m afraid i broke a piece of the thin plastic with a gentle tug because the black plastic lid seems looser than it should be.
@phendrick It’s the tab above the handle, you hold it down with your thumb. If this is like mine it’s a bitch to get all the safety stuff lined up so it works.
@sammydog01 I saw what it was by the diagram in the link I posted. By “questionable” I meant whether it was still intact after I twisted.
When you got yours, was there a manual or “quick start guide” included? None in my box. (The box doesn’t even have the model number on it, nor on the device itself. Registration, which I didn’t finish, also required a serial number, which also was non-existent. I decided the registration was more to get my personal information than anything else.)
I suspect this can make a margarita.
A handy gadget if you need to chop, grind, and otherwise reduce something to smithereens and beyond. But be aware that reviews have often cited the difficulty in cleaning the lid as it doesn’t come apart and food debris and detritus can collect in the the wee groves and inaccessible areas.
I am buying one specifically to chop garlic and ginger for when I cook Indian dishes which call for a ginger-garlic paste to be added to the base gravy.
So no margaritas for moi, at least not in this thing.
@Jackinga maybe a hint of ginger-garlic flavor would make a more interesting margarita?
@pmarin Interesting? I’ll give you that. A ginger-garlic toned margarita would be interesting, but probably not something one would want to quaff* repeatedly…or often.
Of late, I have been cooking a lot of Indian dishes from curries to dals to paneers to rotis/chapatis to alu masala dosas. Many of the sauces (curries, dals, paneers, etc.) start with an oil based pan gravy. The gravy base uses various whole spices (cumin, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, mustard seeds, etc), onions, garlic and ginger pastes, to which are added tomatoes. Then all of this is cooked down before adding the top ingredients (chicken, beef, dals, leaf pastes of spinach (palak), mustard greens and/or kale (saag), etc.) along with more spices.
For a Western cook, this is a complicated and involved technique using what at first seems like far, far too many ingredients. But once one has created a readily accessible spice and ingredient cupboard, it soon takes on a consistent and understandable pattern.
Organizing, gathering and prepping ingredients for a dish is usually about 70-80% of the effort (aka “mise en place”). The actual cooking and plating accounts for the remaining balance of time spent. As part of mise en place, you clean as you go, so at the end, you have your dish or dishes and very little mess.
Since many recipes call for ginger and garlic, what I have in mind is to pre-make a ginger-garlic paste (equal weights of each) using the small Cuisinart grinder on sale here, then to pack that into small, empty, half and half creamer cups, freeze, and vacuum bag a bunch of the filled cups with a chamber vacuum.
I will be able to get about 8g of paste/cup that way. Then when preparing something, it will be easy to just pop the frozen contents of as many of the cups into the pan as needed.
Though a grinder such as this one, can be cleaned, after being used to make a garlic paste, it will be forever sullied and will likely retain a certain, but faint air about it that would take a margarita into another dimension. A wrong dimension for most folks.
Yes, yes, I know that there are a few drinks and cocktails that use garlic to good effect such as the Desperado (garlic infused tequila, vermouth, olive juice, S&P, and garlic stuffed olives as a garnish), but me thinks garlic tainted margaritas are a step in the wrong direction.
Now, if one is talking about Bloody Mary’s (I prefer 8-Balls with gin), that is a whole other story, except one generally doesn’t need a blender to make them.
*quaffing is a lot like drinking, except one spills more.
@Jackinga @pmarin However, “queefing” is something entirely different.
@macromeh @pmarin It is. It is biologically impossible for me to queef.
That being said, it is generally inadvisable to do either in polite company.
@Jackinga @macromeh @pmarin And neither to be confused with eefing.
and I’m not sure about that in polite company either.
[$1 bounty for making it to the end of this video.]
A blender is generally only good for liquids because of the shape of the pitcher. Imagine trying to turn graham crackers into crumbs for a pie crust in a blender: the bottom inch would powder and the rest would sit on top. Same goes for onions, you’d get onion pulp at the bottom of a blender with big chuncks on top.
A chopper has wider bowl to allow more physical circulation and usually has blades at two or more heights to keep things moving. Blenders rely on liquids to circulate material through the blades.
The food processor-chopper difference basically comes down to slicing/grating with a top blade and a feeder tube. Let’s say you want to make potatoes au gratin and/or hash browns. The first requires slicing a lot of potatoes, the second grating them. Both is sucky work until you have spent the time to get the muscle memory of a sous chef. This chopper will do neither but a food processor can slice or grate a potato every 10s.
And don’t try to put celery in a chopper. You will get strings, pulp and celery juice. Which, if you were after celery juice, is fine. But a food processor can slice celery into thin, even disks.
/giphy get to the chopper
@somf69 It’s “chopper.”
I like the red one but I have ZERO counter space. I do kind of resent how colors have been “claimed” by teams, political parties, charities, etc. I just like the color red!
@Kyeh Nobody can claim colors! Do whatever the fuck you want & who cares what other people think of your colors.
@Kyeh @napoleonstokes Real men rock pink food processors.
@napoleonstokes
Oh, don’t worry, I do!
@EvilSmoo @Kyeh @napoleonstokes
I agree. I went through the trouble of doing a custom bicycle build in all black and then slapped on a pair of DMR V6 pedals in pink.
@EvilSmoo @napoleonstokes @yakkoTDI I love it!
@EvilSmoo @Kyeh @yakkoTDI That looks fabulous. Rock it!
@EvilSmoo @napoleonstokes @yakkoTDI
Well, I wouldn’t mind it, but I’m female, so it doesn’t have quite the same impact if I wear pink.
I once used a blender to try and make cranberry sauce. As noted above, the bottom layer liquefied, the cranberries on top just sat there. Being young (27), ignorant, and likely stoned, I shoved a (fortunately) wooden spoon in there WHILE THE BLADES WERE SPINNING.
I found some splotches of cranberry behind the kitchen wall clock when I moved out two years later…
@MrNews Yeah, when I make smoothies with too much frozen stuff, that happens. The solution is to add liquid.
@EvilSmoo Unfortunately, the only liquid my girlfriend and I added was booze… into our mouths. Perhaps a result of working three jobs (one overnight) and some great Thai stick…
@EvilSmoo @MrNews I have the smaller version of this I got here ages ago. I pull it off the shelf once a year at thanksgiving to make cranberry relish. It comes out great and hasn’t exploded once.
/giphy son of a bitch stole my line
@hockeyham I’ll drink to that.
Same price on the kitchen aid website FYI
@bugger yes, same price for refurbished. These are new.
Hey can this be used to chop up bodies? Then @yakkoTDI might actually have an empty trunk. And @OnionSoup won’t have to chop up the patio to remove them before they moved - just use this instead and compost the remains. And @rockblossom while I am sure your suggestion would work it would be easier and cheaper to do this than your suggestion to take them and bury them in an unused cemetery corner complete with headstone and flowers.
(from this thread https://meh.com/forum/topics/worst-thing-to-pack-and-move)
@Kidsandliz my garbage disposal supposedly is powerful enough to chop up bones. Never wanted to test it out though. Not sure how the septic tank would take to a lot of bones.
@Kidsandliz
Nice idea, but skulls and thighbones are destructive to even the most powerful food processors. You need a good-sized wood chipper a la Fargo (original movie). A bigger one, like the forestry services use, is even better. But it would be best if you still had a place to bury the output. (I’m quite particular about my compost and never add bones, meat residue, or fats.) There’s also the Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe solution, but you need a cafe.
I own the older version of this, it is very handy! Chop chop!
Hm. Is this more useful than the blender I already have?
@brainmist There are things that can be done better in one of these than in a blender. If that’s what you need to do, then yes. I had one. Then I got a Ninja. The Kitchenaid miniprocessor saw no use after that.
I have one of these! I probably bought it on this website years ago. It’s great. I use it all the time.
/giphy horrible-bloody-stork
@EvilSmoo That’s a lot different than what I was expecting.
@EvilSmoo and we are all grateful for that.
These are awful/useless choppers.
We had one that replaced the previous version (KFC3510CU)* that was indispensable in the kitchen but lost in a move. This cuts poorly, the cup is wrong for chopping nearly everything, and the blade is flexible/flimsy.
I donated this version when I happened upon a new-in-box replacement for the old model at the local W/M (of all things) sitting tucked away on a shelf.
*Gotten from Meh (or maybe even Woot back in the day) in an obnoxious watermelon pink, but much loved.
Meh³
Specs
Product: KitchenAid 5-Cup Food Chopper
Model: KA-5 CUPS
Condition: New
What’s Included?
Price Comparison
$59.99 at Amazon
Warranty
90 days
Estimated Delivery
Monday, Mar 4 - Tuesday, Mar 5
Is a chopper a blender or something else?
@OnionSoup Yes, to an extent.
@OnionSoup ask and you shall receive!! Sort of…
It’s not quite a Ninja, but a kitchen appliance for sure! Thought of you immediately and yesterday’s thread when I saw today’s offering!
@JWhirly yes. I laughed when I saw it. This one I’m going to have to run past the Mrs. I know she specifically wanted a ninja. I’m also worried this is perhaps more designed for chopping veggies than being a blender.
@JWhirly @OnionSoup Don’t have this but have similar older “choppers” and yes they are relatively small and lightweight and designed to spin a light metal blade. A traditional blender where the base weighs several pounds had a large motor in the base (at least the old good ones did) and would spin a thick heavy-duty blender blade that could crush ice or anything else you put in there (“that’s good bass!”).
Some of the Ninja and other newer designs tend to be able to do both chopping and traditional blending.
@OnionSoup Agreed. I’m wanting more of the bullet/personal size, for quickly mixing protein shakes, then simple cleanup. And our current Ninja of this similar size and ability is working just fine. So another meh.
I am waiting to get mine. I don’t plan on chopping any bones.
I am a little excited. I hope it works good
Got mine delivered last evening. Opened box today. No user guide / manual included. So i just adlibbed to try to open it. i’m afraid i broke a piece of the thin plastic with a gentle tug because the black plastic lid seems looser than it should be.
THEN i went online and found this:
https://www.kitchenaid.com/content/dam/global/documents/201807/use-and-care-w11201342.pdf
The questionable part is where the “pulse” button is on the lid.
Pretty late now; will try it in the morning & report back.
@phendrick It’s the tab above the handle, you hold it down with your thumb. If this is like mine it’s a bitch to get all the safety stuff lined up so it works.
@sammydog01 I saw what it was by the diagram in the link I posted. By “questionable” I meant whether it was still intact after I twisted.
When you got yours, was there a manual or “quick start guide” included? None in my box. (The box doesn’t even have the model number on it, nor on the device itself. Registration, which I didn’t finish, also required a serial number, which also was non-existent. I decided the registration was more to get my personal information than anything else.)