(no subject)
It's been a long time since I posted anything. But I'm missing the long form, and actually the lack of a large and unsympathetic audience is also kind of a relief. It lets me be utterly dull and tedious, to wit:
Let's talk about food processors.
A couple years ago my mother gave me hers - she hardly ever used it. It is a Regal/Moulinex La Machine I, if you want to go find a picture. But no matter, it looks like a food processor.
It's probably not the best food processor in the world. Even if it weren't twenty years old, it has what seem to be a few design flaws.
The bowl is a perfect right cylinder, which holds a vortex very well. This is a bad thing. Most blenders, grinders, and yes food processors have a square shape to the bowl, or little ridges, or some other feature that breaks up the vortex and sends the work back down into the chopper blade. In this particular processor, the agitation is instead accomplished by having the two "wing" blades of the chopper at different levels. So if working with anything liquid, or even liquid-like, the vortex climbs the sides and hangs there.
Also, there is a pretty fat clearance from the blade to the bottom and from the tip of the blade to the wall of the bowl. This surely doesn't help either. One of the things that helps in properly mixing up and otherwise destroying things is fluid shear, and whatever you'd call the same effect in a powder. More clearance means less shear.
Nevertheless, the chopper is still the most useful part of it. I've been making bread dough, pancake mix, starting pastry dough (up through chopping in the butter), finely chopping up cheese, and otherwise having fun with it. I'm sure it would make a perfectly adequate margarita too. I'm willing to bet a kitchen does not need both a food processor and a blender.
I have tried a couple of experiments that didn't work out too well. I tried making butter from cream and it took forever, long enough that the cream warmed up both from agitation and from the motor, and so it took even longer. It did eventually gel. I discovered looking in the manual that there is a whisk blade, but good luck (I told myself) finding one today! Then I looked online and did find one for sale, which kind of amazed me.
I also tried making powdered sugar (1c sugar + 2 tbsp corn starch, grind til done). It didn't work. But I then transferred some of the mix to the coffee grinder and it worked fine. So, once again, it's not violent enough.
The slicer/grater seem to be fairly useless. There is a large gap between the feeder tube and the surface of the slicer, and the work becomes jammed in between the slicer and the lid. It does work all right for very hard vegetables, like uncooked potatoes or celery, but it cuts them too thin and there's no way to control the thickness. The grater is useless for cheese.
All this sounds like I'm whining but it's actually been a lot of fun. And I couldn't beat the price.
Let's talk about food processors.
A couple years ago my mother gave me hers - she hardly ever used it. It is a Regal/Moulinex La Machine I, if you want to go find a picture. But no matter, it looks like a food processor.
It's probably not the best food processor in the world. Even if it weren't twenty years old, it has what seem to be a few design flaws.
The bowl is a perfect right cylinder, which holds a vortex very well. This is a bad thing. Most blenders, grinders, and yes food processors have a square shape to the bowl, or little ridges, or some other feature that breaks up the vortex and sends the work back down into the chopper blade. In this particular processor, the agitation is instead accomplished by having the two "wing" blades of the chopper at different levels. So if working with anything liquid, or even liquid-like, the vortex climbs the sides and hangs there.
Also, there is a pretty fat clearance from the blade to the bottom and from the tip of the blade to the wall of the bowl. This surely doesn't help either. One of the things that helps in properly mixing up and otherwise destroying things is fluid shear, and whatever you'd call the same effect in a powder. More clearance means less shear.
Nevertheless, the chopper is still the most useful part of it. I've been making bread dough, pancake mix, starting pastry dough (up through chopping in the butter), finely chopping up cheese, and otherwise having fun with it. I'm sure it would make a perfectly adequate margarita too. I'm willing to bet a kitchen does not need both a food processor and a blender.
I have tried a couple of experiments that didn't work out too well. I tried making butter from cream and it took forever, long enough that the cream warmed up both from agitation and from the motor, and so it took even longer. It did eventually gel. I discovered looking in the manual that there is a whisk blade, but good luck (I told myself) finding one today! Then I looked online and did find one for sale, which kind of amazed me.
I also tried making powdered sugar (1c sugar + 2 tbsp corn starch, grind til done). It didn't work. But I then transferred some of the mix to the coffee grinder and it worked fine. So, once again, it's not violent enough.
The slicer/grater seem to be fairly useless. There is a large gap between the feeder tube and the surface of the slicer, and the work becomes jammed in between the slicer and the lid. It does work all right for very hard vegetables, like uncooked potatoes or celery, but it cuts them too thin and there's no way to control the thickness. The grater is useless for cheese.
All this sounds like I'm whining but it's actually been a lot of fun. And I couldn't beat the price.