Breville Sous Chef 16 Pro Food Processor Review: Unleash Culinary Excellence

Although Bre­ville does not spe­cial­ize in man­u­fac­tur­ing Food Proces­sors and pro­duces only two mod­els, Sous Chef 16 and Sous Chef 12, they both have a good rep­u­ta­tion despite their high prices.

Here, we will review the Bre­ville Sous Chef 16 and make our hon­est con­clu­sion if this machine is worth adding to your kitchen counter.

Dis­clo­sure: As an Ama­zon Asso­ciate, we may earn an affil­i­ate com­mis­sion for pur­chas­es you make when using the links on this page.

Read More: Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups — Bowl Scraper Review

Motor Power and Base Unit

The Bre­ville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor has a direct dri­ve induc­tion motor that can reach 1200 Watts pow­er at peak, 120V and 10AMPS. Like any oth­er pow­er­ful kitchen machine, it also has a safe­ty brak­ing sys­tem that auto­mat­i­cal­ly shuts off the motor if it overheats.

This Bre­ville Food Proces­sor comes with a heavy base unit with plas­tic (the BFP800XL col­ored ver­sion) and die-cast met­al (the BFP800BSXL mod­el) cov­er. How­ev­er, the mod­el with a die-cast base is $200 more expensive.

The base is also equipped with non-skid rub­ber feet that ensure the safe­ty and sta­bil­i­ty of the machine.

Addi­tion­al­ly, it comes with cord stor­age that push­es the cord into the hous­ing to reduce its length.

Containers

Work Bowls: The BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor has two pro­cess­ing bowls — the 16-cup large one and the 2.5‑cup small bowl. Both bowls are made from BPA-free poly­car­bon­ate and are not designed to process hot or boil­ing liquids.

Accord­ing to the user man­u­al, the 16 cups Large Pro­cess­ing Bowl has a 16-cup capac­i­ty for dry ingre­di­ents and 12 cups (2600 ml/80 fl. oz.) liq­uid capac­i­ty. Gen­er­al­ly, max capac­i­ty depends on the food type you process, and for exam­ple, it will han­dle up to 8 cups at a time of food (veg­gies, fruits, cooked meat) cut up in 1‑inch cubes, up to 2.25 pounds at a time of raw meat, chick­en and fish. At the same time, the small­est batch­es the large 16-cup bowl can han­dle are about 3 cups.

While the 2.5 Cups/600 ml/20 fl. oz. Mini Pro­cess­ing Bowl is designed to per­form mini chop­per func­tions. It will effi­cient­ly process small­er jobs such as chop­ping nuts, herbs, gar­lic, sal­ad dress­ings, and oth­er small chop­ping, mix­ing, whip­ping, and blend­ing chores. The mini pro­cess­ing bowl must be fit­ted inside the large pro­cess­ing bowl and can be used only with mini s‑blades; you can­not slice or shred it.

Lid: The food proces­sor also has a BPA-free poly­car­bon­ate lid with an inbuilt feed­ing chute. The cov­er is locked with the safe­ty sys­tem, giv­ing you some con­fi­dence that every­thing is in place; it also has a sil­i­cone seal that reduces acci­den­tal leak­age while pro­cess­ing large liq­uid recipes.

Feeding Tube 

The BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor comes with two feed chutes – the main one is 5.5″ by 2.5″ moon-shaped, and the small­er 2″ round fits inside a large one. So, you can put in a large-sized pota­to or oth­er veg­gies with­out cut­ting it or insert a bunch of mush­rooms for a quick slice.

The Bre­ville large push­er comes with a safe­ty sys­tem, so if the food pieces are too bulky, the built-in safe­ty switch will pre­vent the machine from running.

Accessories

The Bre­ville BFP800 Sous Chef Food Proces­sor comes with a set of 8 blades and discs for var­i­ous food prep options:

Micro-ser­rat­ed Uni­ver­sal S Blade – is the most com­mon and mul­ti­func­tion­al food proces­sor blade. It is designed for pro­cess­ing a wide vari­ety of tasks such as chop­ping a vari­ety of ingre­di­ents from raw herbs to raw and cooked veg­gies and raw and cooked meat, puree­ing raw and cooked food, mix­ing for burg­ers and cakes, sal­ad dress­ing dips, and oth­ers, blend­ing baby food or soups and whip­ping for and may­on­naise recipes.

Mini Pro­cess­ing Blade – is the mini s‑blade for the small 2.5‑cup bowl and is intend­ed for chop­ping, mix­ing, whip­ping, and blend­ing ingre­di­ents for small recipes.

An adjustable Slicer (disc) is a stain­less steel disc used to slice raw fruit and veg­eta­bles. The disc can reg­u­late 24 dif­fer­ent slic­ing set­tings; hence, you can alter the slice thick­ness from a paper-thin of 0.33mm all the way up to 8.0mm thick.

A reversible Shred­ding Disc is a two-sided thin/medium shred­ding disc designed with two sizes of grat­ing ingre­di­ents. One side of the disc is for the coarse, and the oth­er side for the fine-sized shredding.

Juli­enne Disc — is intend­ed for cut­ting food into long, thin strips. The car­rots, zuc­chi­ni, pota­to, and cel­ery are very well suit­ed for juli­en­ning them with this disc. The large feed chute and hor­i­zon­tal posi­tion­ing of food will pro­duce longer strips. At the same time, a small feed chute and the push­er will make a match stick size short­er strips.

French Fry/Vegetable Stick Disc – is designed for cut­ting ingre­di­ents into long, chunky lengths of sticks. It is intend­ed pri­mar­i­ly to cut French pota­to fries but also cut oth­er firm veg­eta­bles such as sweet pota­toes or but­ter­nut squash.

Emul­si­fy­ing Disc – is designed for whisk­ing eggs, egg whites, whipped cream, milk­shakes, and egg sous­es (may­on­naise, hol­landaise, béarnaise).

Dough Blade – is a blunt edge plas­tic blade that pro­vides a soft com­bi­na­tion of dough ingre­di­ents. It makes all types of dough, such as bread, pas­try, and even pasts dough.

In addi­tion, the food proces­sor comes with a few extra accessories:

Disc Spin­dle is used with all the Adjustable Slicer, Juli­enne Disc, French Fry/Vegetable Stick Disc, Reversible Shred­ding Disc, and Emul­si­fy­ing Disc and fits them onto the bowl dri­ve cou­pling and holds them in posi­tion dur­ing the processing.

A stor­age con­tain­er – is designed for stor­ing blades and discs when they are not in use.

Clean­ing Brush – is a specif­i­cal­ly designed brush with a flat end for scrap­ing and remov­ing food par­ti­cles from all the bowls, blades, and disc crevices.

A plas­tic Spat­u­la – is used for scrap­ing the work bowl sides to help even­ly process all ingredients.

Control Panel

Like most food proces­sors, Bre­ville BFP800XL Sous Chef has a straight­for­ward con­trol pan­el. It is equipped with the POWER/OFF, START/PAUSE, PULSE but­tons, count-up, count-down–downtime set­ting, and LCD. All the but­tons have back­lit around them when they are activated.

Basi­cal­ly, the Bre­ville BFP800XL is oper­at­ed with one speed and pulse func­tion. Nev­er­the­less, the user has enough con­trol over the ingre­di­ents since con­trol is usu­al­ly achieved through the use of slic­ing, shred­ding discs, and oth­er attachments.

The POWER/OFF but­ton turns ON the machine pow­er and will illu­mi­nate the red light around the con­trol, indi­cat­ing that the proces­sor is on.

The PULSE but­ton is oper­at­ed when it holds down and stops when released, and this is a sig­nif­i­cant func­tion for most tasks you will use your food proces­sor for. For exam­ple, the user can adjust the size of chop­ping ingre­di­ents with the pulse.

The START/PAUSE func­tion is used for sim­ple pro­cess­ing or a count-down timer. It starts the machine and runs it con­tin­u­ous­ly until the user press­es this but­ton again. The timer will auto­mat­i­cal­ly count up dur­ing processing.

If the user is required to run the machine for a par­tic­u­lar peri­od, for exam­ple, when knead­ing dough, then the Count-up and count-down func­tions are help­ful. Just press the up or down arrow but­tons at 5, 10, or 20-sec­ond inter­vals to select the desired time for run­ning; press the START/PAUSE, and the machine will run the set cycle with a dis­play count­ing down and stop­ping auto­mat­i­cal­ly at the end of the process. For exam­ple, the timer has 5‑second inter­vals when select­ing from 0 to 30 sec­onds, 10-sec­ond inter­vals from 30 sec­onds to 2 min­utes, and 20-sec­ond inter­vals, the time will increase from 2 min­utes to 9.59 minutes.

Functionality

The Micro-ser­rat­ed uni­ver­sal S‑Blade is designed for var­i­ous tasks, such as chop­ping, puree­ing, minc­ing, mix­ing, and blend­ing raw and cooked food. Depend­ing on the type of food, the con­trol pan­el func­tion, and the time you process, you need to perform.

Сhop­ping: For chop­ping veg­gies for sal­ad, such as onion, cucum­ber, toma­toes, cel­ery, car­rots, and mush­rooms, you should cut the veg­gies or fruits into 1‑inch size cubes and use the PULSE but­ton. You can also chop cau­li­flower rice/couscous by puls­ing it to a semi-fine con­sis­ten­cy. The longer you pulse, the fin­er the chop you get; with the PULSE func­tion, you can get the size you want to have mush.

It is suit­able for minc­ing gar­lic, chili, and gin­ger, and you have to cut gin­ger into 1‑inch cubes while you can process the whole chili and peeled gar­lic cloves. You can use the PULSE of START/PAUSE buttons.

You can also chop herbs, no more than 4 cups at a time, using the PULSE func­tion at 1–2 sec­ond intervals.

Puree­ing and minc­ing veg­gies: The S‑blades are very good at puree­ing raw and cooked pota­toes, pump­kin, car­rots, parsnip, and oth­ers to the mash con­sis­ten­cy or fruits for pies. You can also make baby food with it. You can adjust the size of chop­ping ingre­di­ents for puree by puls­ing it for longer, or you may also use the START but­ton for con­tin­u­ous processing.

Mix­ing: The S‑blade is also per­fect for mix­ing ingre­di­ents for the sal­ad dress­ing, sal­sa, rel­ish, and dips recipes. You usu­al­ly will use the pulse func­tion for a few seconds.

You can also mix bat­ter for cook­ies, pan­cakes, and oth­er recipes.

Meat chop­ping and minc­ing: The BFP800XL Sous Chef can chop and mince (ham­burg­er blend, for exam­ple) both cooked and raw meat, chick­en and fish. You need to cut meat or fish into one-inch/2.5cm cubes and remove all the bones before cut­ting them. The Food Proces­sor’s large bowl will han­dle a max­i­mum of 2.25 pounds (or 1kg) of raw meat. For pro­cess­ing raw meat, you can use the START/PAUSE but­ton to run the machine for 30 sec and repeat 30-sec­ond cycles until you attain the desired consistency.

If you are pro­cess­ing cooked meat, you cut into the same 1‑inch cubes; how­ev­er, you bet­ter use the PULSE func­tion for this purpose.

Nut Chop­ping and mak­ing Nut But­ter: S‑blades is very good at chopping/dicing nuts for var­i­ous recipes using the PULSE function.

It also can make per­fect nut but­ter; you will use the STAR/PAUSE but­ton to run the machine con­tin­u­ous­ly until the desired con­sis­ten­cy, stop­ping it after 1–2 min­utes to scrape the sides. The entire process will take about 15 min­utes. You can process a max­i­mum of 6 cups of nuts in one go.

Blend­ing: The Food Proces­sor is not pre­cise­ly designed to process liq­uids such as smooth­ies, nut milk, or soups, but it can do it even if it is not as good as a blender.

How­ev­er, it does a good job pro­cess­ing the cooked veg­gies with broth to puree soups (turnip, broc­coli, cau­li­flower, cel­ery, or potatoes).

How­ev­er, pro­cess­ing ice cubes or frozen ingre­di­ents in a work bowl is not recommended.

Grind­ing: It was not designed to grind meat bones or cof­fee beans.

Knead­ing: The BFP800XL Sous Chef has a spe­cial­ly designed Dough Blade that makes bread, pas­ta, and cook­ie dough. You can process dough ingre­di­ents (flour, but­ter, yeast, and oth­ers) using the PULSE func­tion or run the START/PAUSE but­ton until the desired dough con­sis­ten­cy is reached. Although you some­times need to fin­ish the knead­ing with your hand, it does not always work perfectly.

Slic­ing: The Bre­ville Food Proces­sor comes with a slic­ing disk with adjustable thick­ness from fine 0.33mm to 8.0mm thick (24 thick­ness set­tings in total). So you can slice from any fruit and veg­gies (pota­to, onion, mush­room, car­rot, cucum­ber, beet, leek, cab­bage, apple, and pear) to meat and pep­per­oni; for meat, you bet­ter freeze a lit­tle before pro­cess­ing for the best result. Of course, you have to use the START/PAUS func­tion for the slic­ing task.

Shred­ding: This Food proces­sor is equipped with a Shred­ding and Grat­ing Reversible Disc with thick and thin grat­ing options, so you can shred eas­i­ly and quick­ly shred car­rots, pump­kin, and beets for sal­ad, pota­toes for pie or frit­ta­ta, zuc­chi­ni or egg­plant for sal­ad or frit­ta­ta, cheese for piz­za, and oth­ers. You will use the START/PAUSE but­ton to per­form shred­ding tasks.

 Shred­ding Veg­etable Spaghet­ti: If with a shred­ding disc, you will shred and grate the short sticks only, the Bre­ville Juli­enne Disc is designed to make per­fect veg­etable spaghet­ti-like long thin strips in the man­ner of a spi­ral­iz­er from a vari­ety of veg­gies and fruits such as car­rots, zuc­chi­ni, pota­to, and cel­ery. You will use the START/PAUSE func­tion while using the Juli­enne Disc.

Whisk­ing: if you need to make may­on­naise, whipped cream, milk­shakes, egg sauces (may­on­naise, hol­landaise, béar­naise), or whisk egg whites for meringues and oth­er desserts, the Bre­ville will do it for you using the Emul­si­fy­ing Disc.

French Fries: The BFP800XL Sous Chef comes with a Veg­etable Stick Disc designed to cut ingre­di­ents into long, chunky lengths sticks for mak­ing pota­toes, but­ter­nut squash, or pump­kin French fries. The veg­gie sticks are about 2–3 inch­es and have medi­um (not skin­ny) thickness.

Warranty

The BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor is cov­ered by only a one-year stan­dard war­ran­ty that guar­an­tees free of charge, includ­ing ship­ping costs for machine replace­ment, should it fail with­in the first year of pur­chase. In addi­tion, Bre­ville offers ben­e­fi­cial cus­tomer service.

Although the Bre­ville Sous Chef Food Proces­sor is engi­neered in Aus­tralia and pro­duced in Chi­na, it still has a mod­est war­ran­ty for such an expen­sive prod­uct and rep­utable com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, as a bonus, the com­pa­ny offers a 25-year motor warranty.

Dimensions

The BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor has a large foot­print mea­sur­ing 8 inch­es long X 10.25 inch­es wide and a tall pro­file of 17.75 inch­es high (with the lid and push­er and 12.5 inch­es with­out the lid). As a result, this machine is too tall to fit under the stan­dard kitchen cab­i­net and requires a lot of stor­age space. In addi­tion, the device has a long pow­er cord that mea­sures approx­i­mate­ly 41 inches.

It is also a hefty and ful­ly assem­bled unit that weighs 19.4 lbs, while in the man­u­fac­tur­er’s box, it weighs about 26 lbs.

Although the stor­age cad­dy is also very large and mea­sures 9.5 inch­es X 12 inch­es X 7.75 inch­es, it fits all the acces­sories nicely.

Extra Attachments

You can buy any replace­ment parts via the Bre­ville web­site, and some of them are avail­able on Ama­zon, includ­ing work bowls, blades, all disks and disc spin­dles, stor­age cad­dy, push­ers, and much more.

You can also buy addi­tion­al attachments:

• Peel and Dice attach­ment with 12 mm dic­ing grid and peel­ing disk that allows you to peel and dice the pota­toes into 12mm cubes;
• The dic­ing Kit includes a 12mm and 8 mm dic­ing grid and dice pota­toes and oth­er veg­gies into 12 and 8 mm cubes.

Special Features

Col­or: Bre­ville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor is avail­able in three col­ors — Black Sesame, Cran­ber­ry Red, Brushed Alu­mini­um, and Stain­less Steel. The col­ored mod­els come with a plas­tic base unit, while the stain­less steel ver­sion has a stain­less steel base unit. The stain­less steel mod­el costs about $200 more than the col­ored ones.

 Volt­age Sys­tem: All Bre­ville prod­ucts dis­trib­uted in North Amer­i­ca are built and rat­ed for use with 110 — 120v, 60Hz with­in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da only. You can use elec­tri­cal con­vert­ers or adapters to run this machine; this will com­pro­mise the Bre­ville warranty.

You are advised to search for a local retail­er that dis­trib­utes Bre­ville Food proces­sors with an appro­pri­ate volt­age sys­tem and war­ran­ty valid in your region.

Noise

The Bre­ville Sous Chef Food Proces­sor is a pow­er­ful machine; still, it is not among the loud­est food proces­sors. Instead, it releas­es noise with­in 73–80 Dbs. and sounds not like noise as blenders. Besides, the food proces­sor usu­al­ly runs for under 1 minute and often uses the pulse func­tion, so the sound lev­el should not be very annoying.

Breville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Processor Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The Bre­ville Sous Chef comes with 16 cups and 2.5 cups con­tain­ers that eas­i­ly han­dle large and small recipes;
• It includes a set of 8 discs and blades and man­ages a large vari­ety of tasks;
• Wide 2‑in‑1 feed tube mea­sur­ing 5.5″ X 2.5″ and the 2″ in diameter;
• Acces­sories are stored in a con­ve­nient caddy;
• The Slic­ing Disc can be reg­u­lat­ed to 24 dif­fer­ent slic­ing set­tings from 0.3 mm to 8.0 mm thick;
• The set Includes French fries accessories;
• It comes with a whisk­ing attach­ment to expand functions;
• Very pow­er­ful and han­dle even the most dif­fi­cult ingredients;
• It has three safe­ty mech­a­nisms that will pre­vent the proces­sor from run­ning if not cor­rect­ly set ‑the work bowl, the lid, and the food pusher;

Cons:

• It is huge and requires a lot of stor­age space;
• It does not fit under most of the kitchen cabinets;
• It is expensive;
• It is made in Chi­na and designed and engi­neered in Australia.

Breville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Processor Price

Bre­ville BFP800BSXL Sous Chef 16 Pro Food Proces­sor is an absolute­ly bril­liant machine. It is quick­ly and eas­i­ly a lot of food pro­cess­ing tasks. How­ev­er, this piece of equip­ment is an expen­sive one despite the fact it is worth every penny.

Bre­ville BFP800XL Sous Chef Food Proces­sor, via Amazon

Summary

The Bre­ville BFP800XL Sous Chef is an excel­lent machine with the largest acces­sories selec­tion and per­forms var­i­ous food pro­cess­ing tasks. It comes with typ­i­cal acces­sories like S‑blades, Cut­ting and Shred­ding Disks, and spi­ral­iz­ers like Juli­enne Disks for mak­ing veg­gies, spaghet­ti con­ve­nient French Fries Disks, and even whip­ping acces­sories. And its adjustable Cut­ting Disk has 24 settings.

So, if you are an avid cook­er and make meals and food prep for big house­holds a few times a week, this machine is def­i­nite­ly worth splash­ing mon­ey on. How­ev­er, it would be best to remem­ber that this machine is enor­mous and will require a huge counter and stor­age space.