Breville VFP033 Intelligent Food Processor

This Breville Food processor has a very small footprint on the the worktop. All the removable parts are fully dishwasher safe and the components all have a robust feel.

To check out this "intelligent" food processor I tried a variety of its pre-programmed functions.

The flat whipping attachment was able to beat a single egg, and the clearance on it suggests that it would be capable of whipping a a quarter of that volume.

The grating disk dealt with raw parsnips and potatoes in seconds.

The adjustable slicer was able to slice courgettes thinly and onions on a course setting rapidly and evenly.

The main bowl attaches nice and easily, and the comes off smoothly and easily. Although everything, locks together when in use, the pieces come apart easily when necessary.

Overall the programs seem appropriate and functional. There are manual controls for adjusting speed and pulsing for conventional food-processing.

So far I haven't tried the liquidiser, but otherwise, I'm very pleased with the machine.

The product photos really don't do the Breville Processor justice. When it arrived and I got it unpacked, it's amazing how they've managed to design a product that is very neat and practical on one hand, but managed to look so cheap and tacky on the other with white i-pod style plastic and black highlights.

Cheap looking aside, the Processor packs away very nicely, all the blades fit into the main bowl which just leaves your blender jug to be stored separately, giving you a very neat foot print for storing on your bench for easy access, although as another review has already pointed out, I'm not sure you'd really want to give this pride of place due to the cheap look of it.

My main concern with the unit, everything about it is either an outright negative, or a positive outweighed by a negative, for specifics:

Whilst the unit is very light and easy to move, this in turn means you have to hold it down while in use so it doesn't throw itself straight off the bench.

The motor has plenty of power behind it, but in turn this is making it unnecessarily loud, and with no apparent packing to reduce the noise and the vibration, this adds to the cheap poor quality impression of the unit.

The processing bowl is quite small, which adds to the overall small footprint, however it also meant that the food didn't have much room to move. Much of the food was stuck to the wall of the bowl and wasn't processed at all, whilst the food in the centre of the bowl was over-processed in a matter of seconds. (I tried several things in it from cakes to beef burgers, and everything suffered from the same problem of being either unprocessed or over-processed)

The lid of the processor bowl has a rubber seal which ensures that nothing is going to spill out, however the seal is so tight it made it very difficult to get the lid on and off, and would be of no use to anyone with hand/joint problems.

The tab on the underside of the blender jug snapped off after one use, rendering the blender useless as the main unit no longer registered it as being attached, so the controls would not activate. Whilst this could just be a faulty jug, it did sum up the overall feel of the plastic used and the expected short lifespan it will have.

The included spatula is made of such cheap rigid plastic, it felt likely to shatter the first time it was touched, so you would need to have one of your own to hand.

There were only three parts of the machine that I really did like, one, the well thought out all-in-one storage for the blades and attachments, secondly the easy of attaching and detaching the tools (they clip in so you can even take the jug off and pour the contents out without the blades dropping off as they do on my old processor) and thirdly, the adjustable slicer, allowing the user to have the thickness they want, rather than the usual two options of thick or thin.

In all, for the current selling price of £120 I'd expect a lot more out of a Food Processor and I would recommend looking for a different make/model and avoid this one at all costs, unless you want to have to replace it after a few months of unsuccessful use.

This Breville has a solid motor unit, a useful assortment of blades, can store all the bits within itself, and has the bonus of a very handy separate blender jug, giving this the potential of being an extremely desirable kitchen tool.

The ergonomics of using it and the various featured cutters are reasonable, noticeably better than some similar machines I have used in recent years.

BUT, I have a few quibbles. The first three are major, and the fourth is a possible Safety issue.

1. It is much too noisy.
The gears grinding away all the time are a pain on the ear. It is even noisier than the similarly arranged Jamie Oliver Food Processor I tested two years ago. Owww...

2. (Added 2/1/2012) There is a major design flaw with the Blender jug. The safety interlock tabs are fragile and easily knocked off when fitting it onto the base unit; end of jug. They could easily have made the interlock as part of the bayonet fixing instead of this silly tab system. This definitely loses it another star.

3. The "Intelligent" speed control is a stupid joke, especially when compared with other less "Intelligent" machines such as this Philips Food Processor.
All the buttons work for both attachments, so why bother labelling one set for Blender and one set for Processor?
All the speeds are too fast, and there is no useful difference between any of the speeds offered on the four buttons for the Blender, or the four buttons offered for the Processor, except going from Fast, to Faster Still, to Far Too Blinding Fast.
The remaining four buttons for `Pulse', `+', `-`, Stop are also no improvement, since it always starts Fast and the `-` then has to be used to reduce the speed, by which time the damage has been done, and even then the speed hunts up and down.
The high speed of the machine on anything but Pulse means that almost everything is reduced to a pulp, regardless of which blade or cutter is selected.
I find it daft that the Pulse button is the only simple way to run it more slowly.

4. There is no safety interlock with the Jug lid, so it is possible for a Darwin Award candidate to explore the moving parts or to be splashed with hot liquids.

5. I miss having a dedicated blunt dough blade, the slicer simply destroys it. My old Morphy Richards Compact Food Processor fares much better here.

Many Good Points.

1. The Processor bowl is has both handle and filler at the front. This is excellent since one doesn't use both at the same time and it does not matter if the user is left or right handed. Simply pull it towards the centre front to lock it in place - nice and intuitive for a right hander. And the lack of any ribs on the bowl means it is easy to extract the last bits of food.

2. The lid is secured in the same way and has a rubber seal to prevent spillage when whisking up liquids such as soup. Note that the rubber seal on the lid makes it very difficult to fit when dry, fortunately this operation becomes very easy when the mating surfaces are lubricated with some water or cooking oil.

3. The two slicer/grater discs each have a different face for the other way up, allowing four coarsenesses of destruction of the food. If the machine was slower one might be able to distinguish between the results!

4. The adjustable Julienne cutter is a very neat idea, shame about the high speeds.

5. The emulsifying disc produces silky smooth mayonnaise and cheese sauces. Speed is good here.

6. The general purpose slicer blade is highly effective and reduces everything to a fine shred in brief instants. It reaches close to the sides of the bowl, and close to the bottom, so not much food will escape its fate. Again the excessive speed is the only problem.

7. The safety interlock on the bowl and lid is ingenious and works well. There is no chance of losing bits of fingers or being splashed with boiling hot liquids.

8. The blender Jug is excellent in use when the lid is secure, and is easy to clean, even though it cannot be dismantled.

9. There is a handy storage drawer on the base of the motor unit where the two disc tools are kept, and the remaining parts store neatly in the bowl. In a cluttered or bijou kitchen this is a very welcome bonus. But this makes the unit tall, and it just touches the bottom of our wall cupboards.

10. All the components (apart from the motor unit, of course) can be (apparently) washed safely in a dishwasher. But I think the Jug handle and the interlock mechanism channel in the Bowl might collect dishwasher sediment, so we wash those units by hand.

Summary.

This could have been a brilliant processor; all the tools are nice and well thought out, really ergonomic, but it loses at least one star for the ridiculously high speed and excessive noise, and I've down-rated it another star because of the very poor jug design.

I would have liked a proper variable speed control, after all, if my electric drill can have one, then why not a food processor? As an electronic design engineer I'm tempted to consider putting in my own control circuit, but that will have to wait until the warranty expires.

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Addendum 1. 11 April 2012

Jug failure.

Both of the safety-interlock tabs beneath the jug have snapped off. This is a fault of design/manufacture: ie, if it had been made of polycarbonate it would not have been brittle enough to snap; conversely, if it had been designed with the cheaper plastic in mind the tabs should have been much thicker to resist the inevitable accidental damage.

The Breville support people were very friendly and helpful, but I said for them not to send me another jug from existing stock because it would fail again in a few more months. Rather, they should fix the problem first.

I have bodged it on the one side by clamping a small bit of folded 1mm thick aluminium sheet to one of the ribs to form a makeshift replacement tab.