Jamie Oliver DO250D34 750 Watts Food Processor, 2 Litre, With Blender

I chose the jamie Oliver food processor as I am short of cupboard & worktop space but needed both a processor & blender. Made by Tefal this is a nice looking bit of kit that is light enough for lifting in & out of a cupboard, though I do have to remove the bowl to get it to fit in. It is a tad noisy as other reviewers have already pointed out but this suggests to me a better made motor with metal drive cogs. Apparently, Mrs Housewife wants a quiet machine, so they now put plastic drive cogs in a lot of processors to make them quieter than they would be with metal ones. The issue with that is that they strip & ware down when put under pressure or a full load, like cheese.This seems to cope with this ok along with the chopping of veg etc as the suction cups on the base keep the unit firmly in place. The blade is extremely sharp & sits close to the base of the bowl so nothing gets stuck under it; making light work of foods as it chops quickly & evenly. I'm not a baker so can't report on it's cake/dough making skills but would advise that for this or other family use the bowl may be a little on the small side. It is also made of a very flimsy looking plastic that wouldn't stand up to been accidentally dropped. The blender is made of the same thin plastic but is very powerfull making light work of ice & frozen fruit for smoothies. Again it is a tad on the small size so if you need a blender that copes with more than 2 large portions of anything I'd look elsewere. In summery I'd say if cooking for 2 like myself this is absolutly perfect. It is a great price for a well made direct drive model that copes VERY well with all your chopping, grating & blending needs & it is easy to use & put together. If cooking for a family or making cake and dough mixes I'd look for a model with a larger bowl capacity.

To start off with some background info that's worth noting. This Jamie Oliver food processor (by Tefal) was an upgrade over my £15 Cookworths model picked up from a high street retailer, and purchased for about £80 six months ago, so much of this review compares this mid price range food processor to a budget one. Furthermore, I don't use any of the attachments to slice or grate anything as I personally find it fiddly swapping the attachments around, and I'm comfortable using a grater/knife anyway for those tasks. So this review is only concerned with the main big blade chopper, with the main vegetables I tend to chop/blitz being onions (for curries for example), carrots, and celery (for a fine mirepoix). Depending on what I'm cooking, or how many different items, I might process only a few vegetables (e.g. 2-3 onions), or I might do a bigger batch (10+ onions). If it's a small number of vegetables, I tend to just drop them down the little chute/chimney whilst the processor is running. If it's a bigger batch, I prefer to put them all in the jug, fit the jug onto the base, and then blitz awap.

The budget food processor referred to earlier was a very simple one, very cheap, certainly not pleasing on the eye, but it did the job pretty well. I put vegetables and even meat in it, using the main big blade, and it chopped and mixed things into a pulp if left long enough. Everything was consistently chopped/pulverised as the blade was right up against the inside of the base jug, and that base jug had straight sides, which ensured food would rise up the sides and then fall back into the middle.

The first criticism I have to make of this Jamie Oliver Tefal food processor therefore is that it simply won't consistently chop/pulverise the vegetables all over, especially if I'm using a larger number of vegetables (so not dropping them in one by one down the chute). There are two design flaws prevalent which I didn't notice in the shop that cause this failure to produce consistent chopping using the main large blade.

Firstly, the blades don't actually reach the very edge of the inside walls of the jug. There's a considerable gap between the plastic walls of the jug and the edge of the blade - it might only be half a centimetre, but it's enough to leave a small wall of roughly chopped vegetables that just seem to remain there without ever being brought back into the action so to speak.

Secondly, the jug doesn't have straight sides. It's slightly curved, getting wider as you go up from the bottom. I think what this results in is that food being chopped at the bottom rises to the top on the sides, and because the jug gets wider as the food rises up, it results in a small top layer of larg chunks of vegetable just sitting on the sides, out of reach of the main body of pulp that is being continously. Which means having to get a spatula, spoon the excess chunks back in to the main mixture, and blitzing again (or just living with having different sized chunks in your mixture, which is what I do now).

Another minor criticism for the main chopper is that you can't take the jug out, fill it with vegetables, and then put it back in for blitzing. The reason for this is that the blade is forced upwards by the connection when you try to slot the jug back into the machine, and hence food then falls underneath the blade which then then prevents it from fitting back into the machine. So you basically have to always have the jug fitted to the machine first, and then add food to it. The annoyance here is that this wasn't the case with my earlier model, and so I could take the jug off, scoop my vegetables from the chopping board into the jug, and put it back in. I know this isn't a major deal, but it's one of those little things that can be annoying depending on how you like to cook.

Now, that's the main flaw with the big blade. Beyond that, the chopper is pretty decent. It's very compact, the jug is strong, the blades could sit slightly better in the jug than it does but it's not a real issue for me. Overall, for the price paid, it looks very nice, and in the store the only ones that looked better were the Magimix ones which were three times the price and out of my budget. This is why I give this food processor 3 stars. If the price was more reasonable (let's say £30), it'd be a 4 star processor.

Regarding the important safety issue. In all food processors (and as far as I'm aware, in blenders too), there is a saftey mechanism within the lid that prevents you, or a kid, from turning on unless the lid is attached and locked in place - obviously this ensures you can't stick your hand into the chopper whilst it's on. I have a seperate stand-alone cheapo blender, and it has this safety mechanism in that it wont turn on without the lid attached. This safety feature is of course present with the main chopper jug, as you'd expect, however the lid safety mechanism is NOT present for the blender that comes with this package (in the picture this is the rectangular jug on the right). This blender has a small integrated blade/whisk sitting at the bottom, which is pretty sharp (it has to be of course to blend fruits/vegetables into a smooth liquid pulp). The lid has no mechanism at all for detecting whether it's in place or not, it's just a simple lid that sits on top, and as such you can use the blender jug without any lid at all. Which might be very dangerous if you're going to leave it lying around for children to attach and play with. So just a word of caution regarding the blender, which I have tucked away in a draw as I'd rather use a stand alone blender with better safety features.

The Jamie Oliver Food Processor is fantastic. It functions more efficiently than its predecessor an Antony Worrall Thompson by Breville FP21 Intelligent Food Processor. It also takes up much less space in my kitchen.

It is well built, and beautifully designed for functionality. The fact that it has easy storage for all of the accessories that it comes with is a positive bonus. The appropriate accessories can be added and removed very swiftly, with a minimum of effort.

There is only a very slight difference between the thickness of cut (tried with courgettes and onions) with the slicing tool, and maybe a thicker cut option would have been an nice touch. Similarly, both grades of grater seem to produce very similar results when used on emmental cheese. That being said, the results of both slicing and grating are very even and extremely quick.

Although the packaging claims the liquidiser has a capacity of 1.25 litres - the instructions tell you that you should only liquidize at most 1 litre of anything. Similarly the main bowl is also restricted to a total of 1 litre of product, even though it has a total capacity of 2 litres.

The liquidizer, its stopper, the mixing bowl and the feeder tube are all graduated in a variety of measures. Again this works very well and the asymmetric design seems to produce an excellent result, without stuff at the edges being missed by the blades, unlike the one that comes with the Antony Worrall Thompson by Breville FP21 Intelligent Food Processor.

The emulsifier disk can whisk small or large volumes efficiently - if you want to make meringue from only 2 egg whites, it will do it in a couple of seconds.

The Jamie Oliver Food Processor is dishwasher safe, and unlike the Antony Worrall Thompson by Breville FP21 Intelligent Food Processor, handles stoppers lids and other components have all been designed so that they do not trap water from the dish-washing process. All the components seem to be sturdy.

The manual comes in a wide variety of languages, including Danish and Arabic, but is very basic. It also mentions an optional mini-chopper, but at the time of writing, this doesn't seem to be available.

As with all the food processors that I've owned, I would have liked it even more if the machine came with a second main bowl - to save washing up between processing different ingredients - but then I'm picky and I think that's the most negative comment that I can make about this wonderful machine.