A food processor can slice, dice, chop, and do about everything except actually cook your meals. Yet for the most part, people don’t use the food processor to its fullest potential.
You might slice up some vegetables for a salad or occasionally make pesto sauce with it. Well, here are 10 other uses for your food processor that you may have never considered.
1. Grind Meat
Often you can save money by buying larger pieces of meat and then grinding them down to make hamburger meat. Chuck, sirloin and even steak can be grounded down to suit a specific recipe.
2. Grind Flour
Many types of whole grains and rolled oats can be made into flour. While it won’t have the same, very fine, the consistency as unbleached flour from a mill, it should still suit your purposes — especially when you want specialty, gluten-free flour for baking.
3. Make Breadcrumbs
It seems like such a waste to throw out the heels of bread. Well, you don’t really have to as you can use the food processor to make bread crumbs for stuffing and other dishes.
4. Create Nut and Seed Butter
Nut and seed butter tastes delicious on crackers, toast, or bagels. You can make peanut butter, almond butter, sunflower seed butter, cashew butter or use any type of seed or nut that you prefer.
5. Make Dips, Sauces and Spreads
The one thing a food processor does is make big things into very small pieces. So it is the go-to tool when you want to create dips, sauces and spreads to make the grinding and cutting process a little bit easier on the fingers.
6. Puree Soups
Those immersion blenders look awesome in food shows when pureeing soups. Yet the price for one seems a bit too much when a food processor can do the same job for a lot less money and it can do so many other things.
7. Churn Butter
Whenever you think about churning butter, you might imagine a young maid standing in the barn with an old-fashioned butter churn device as she moves the plunger up and down.
Thanks to modern technology, you can churn butter right in your food processor. This is great when you want to make specialty butter, such as lemon butter or garlic chive butter, right in your kitchen.
8. Make Mayonnaise
There’s nothing worse than taking out the mayonnaise jar and finding less than teaspoon left. When you can’t eat your sandwich dry, you can make mayonnaise with egg yolks, vinegar, salt, lemon juice, and mustard. Once you get the hang of making mayonnaise in your food processor, you can try different flavors such as chive and — dare we say it — bacon mayonnaise.
9. Create Hummus
Hummus is created from chickpeas that are ground up. You can easily make your own and save money instead of picking up a jar of hummus from the grocery store.
10. Make Soft Serve Ice Cream
Ice cream can get expensive, especially during the summer. You can have soft serve ice cream by making it at home with your food processor. One of the easiest recipes is banana ice cream with cut up frozen banana pieces.
These are just a few ton ways how you can use your food processor. There are many other recipes you can try as you will find yourself using this nifty appliance every day. And you will be surprised that you don’t have to break the bank to get yourself one. To find the best food processor for the money, read this round-up post I’ve written. 😉 [no_toc]
