Hamilton Beach Food Processor 10 Cups — Bowl Scraper Review

Hamil­ton Beach is a well-known kitchen appli­ances man­u­fac­tur­er in the USA that pro­duces a range of food proces­sors in low and medi­um-price cat­e­gories. The Food Proces­sor 10 Cups — Bowl Scraper (70730) is one of the cheap­est food proces­sors avail­able on the mar­ket and a trendy one.

If you won­der if this Food Proces­sor is worth con­sid­er­ing buy­ing, read our com­pre­hen­sive review to find out.

Base Unit and Motor Power

Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups has 450 watts of pow­er­ful motor, which is quite a lot for the price. How­ev­er, it has enough pow­er for the chop­ping, shred­ding, and slic­ing job, an essen­tial food pro­cess­ing func­tion. It also can han­dle mix­ing cook­ies or cake dough; how­ev­er, it does not design for heavy tasks like knead­ing bread dough.

The motor is designed for a max­i­mum of 2 min­utes of con­tin­u­ous oper­a­tion, after which you have to let the proces­sor rest about 4 min­utes before con­tin­u­ing. Addi­tion­al­ly, the base unit is equipped with suc­tion cups that keep the device sta­ble dur­ing oper­a­tion and have a nice lit­tle feature.

Bowl Capacity

The 10-cup/2365 ml work bowl is made of BPA-free poly­car­bon­ate. It is well con­struct­ed and does not have any leak­ing issues. Although it does not come with a mini con­tain­er, it can process from small such as 3 ‑5 gar­lic cloves to ample food batch­es food up to 2 to 3 cups/500 ml to 750 ml of veg­gies and fruits, 1 lb./450 g (cut in 1″ [2.5‑cm] cubes) of Meats, 5–8 ounces/140 g ‑230g of hard cheese (cut in 1″ cubes), and 10 cups/2.3 L of crackers.

The bowl’s lid fea­tures an inte­grat­ed feed chute and remov­able scraper han­dle (which helps remove food from the bowl’s sides). Besides, the lid could be turned upside down to put the chute inside the bowl for easy stor­age. In addi­tion, the top has an inte­grat­ed secu­ri­ty sys­tem and will pre­vent unit oper­a­tion if it is not in the cor­rect position.

Feed Chute

As men­tioned above, the feed tube is part of the work bowl cov­er. It works in com­bi­na­tion with a food push­er. Hamil­ton Beach Food — Bowl Scraper has a square shape with round­ed angles feed chute sizes 3 inch­es x 1.75 inch­es and 3.5 inch­es tall. So, you can eas­i­ly fit an 8 oz rec­tan­gle block of cheese down the chute with a lit­tle room to spare, and it is wide enough for a whole zuc­chi­ni, car­rots, pota­toes, or half of a medi­um apple.

Control Panel and Speeds

Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups has an excel­lent clean dial-up knob with two speeds, pulse func­tion, and a switch-off position.

Speed 2 is con­tin­u­ous and could be used for cut­ting or grind­ing hard fruits and veg­eta­bles, cheese, choco­late, or meat.

Speed 1 is the low con­tin­u­ous speed designed for prepar­ing sauces such as pesto or sal­sa and cut­ting and slic­ing soft fruits and veg­eta­bles such as toma­toes, onions, and others.

Pulse Func­tion ℗ allows you to con­trol the chop­ping of short por­tioned foods to avoid over-pro­cess­ing them. The Pulse is also help­ful for prepar­ing ground meat and mashed potatoes.

Attachments and Accessories

This food proces­sor fea­tures only 3 attachments:

 

• Chop­ping or the S‑blade has a plas­tic base and stain­less steel s‑shaped blades. The chop­ping blade is the most mul­ti­func­tion­al attach­ment, which is usu­al­ly used for 80–90% of food pro­cess­ing tasks such as chop­ping all kinds of ingre­di­ents, minc­ing veg­eta­bles, fruit, or herbs, knead­ing dough, mix­ing, puree­ing, and blending.
• Scraper - the attach­ment works only with S‑blade. It is designed to scrap the small to large bits from stick­ing to the work­ing bowl walls and blend them back into the bowl con­tent. So, the ingre­di­ents get chopped uni­form­ly. It can be used with an acti­vat­ed food proces­sor or when it is off. Many cus­tomers rec­og­nize it as a very use­ful attach­ment, espe­cial­ly if you process small amounts of food or sticky ingredients.
• Reversible Slicing/Shredding Disc — it is used to shred and slice a vari­ety of foods. One side of the disc has a slic­ing blade (approx­i­mate­ly 1/4 inch thick), and anoth­er side has shred­ding teeth (fine size). The disc has stamped “Slice” or “Shred” on each side of the disc, so you will not be con­fused when using it. While it has only one size for slic­ing and shred­ding, it is still enough for such a cheap food processor.

Optional Accessories

The ama­zon, Hamil­ton Beach web­site, or oth­er retail­ers offer to buy all replace­ment parts for the Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor, which include:

• Shred­ding slic­ing disc;
• Chop­ping Blade;
• Work­ing Bowl, Scrapper;
• Bowl lid and pusher;

The man­u­fac­tur­er also offers addi­tion­al attach­ments for this gad­get, such as:

• French Fry Disc;
• Crin­kle Cut/Fine Shred Disc.

Functionality

Chop­ping: The Hamil­ton Beach food proces­sor’ S‑blade is designed effi­cient­ly chop var­i­ous veg­gies and fruits, includ­ing onion, car­rots, pep­pers, cel­ery, and cab­bage, or even make per­fect cau­li­flower rice from cau­li­flower flo­rets. It does a decent job chop­ping a small amount of gar­lic, horse­rad­ish, and gin­ger. It can also chop reg­u­lar cook­ies into fine crumbs or crack­ers into crumbs for pie crust. More­over, it has no prob­lem chop­ping nuts, cheese, and cooked meat.

How­ev­er, for the best result, you need to pre-cut ingre­di­ents into 1‑inch/2.5cm bits before pro­cess­ing and using the Pulse func­tion. Oth­er­wise, you may over-process the food up to puree condition.

Puree­ing and Minc­ing: It is also the S‑blade job. For this task, you can use the speed of 1 or 2 depend­ing on the hard­ness of the food. It can puree cooked veg­gies (like pota­to, broc­coli, and toma­toes) and meat (beef, pork, chick­en, and fish) for soup, baby food, and oth­er recipes. How­ev­er, it would help if you processed medi­um to large batch­es of food to achieve uni­form pureeing.

Mix­ing: This food proces­sor is excel­lent at mix­ing sal­sa, pesto, gua­camole, hum­mus, etc., with min­i­mum mess, and the scrap­per is a great help in this task to scrape food bits off the sides and bot­tom. You bet­ter use the Pulse func­tion for all mix­ing jobs to avoid mush­ing the ingredients.

Meat Chop­ping and Minc­ing: The Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor S‑blade can also be used for chop­ping and cut­ting meat. It can eas­i­ly han­dle dry and dense ingre­di­ents like cooked beef, chick­en, fish, and crab meat. For chop­ping, you bet­ter use Puls­ing and for minc­ing con­tin­u­ous speed. It is also pow­er­ful enough to grind raw meat; how­ev­er, you have to cut it into cubes, freeze it until firm, and process it in small batches.
Nut Chop­ping and Mak­ing Nut But­ter: It can puree nuts to make almost per­fect nut but­ter; it takes about 10 min­utes to make almond but­ter and 5 min­utes for peanut but­ter. You bet­ter start with a slow pulse until the nuts are uni­form­ly small and then have it on high. The scraper works and is a great help in pro­cess­ing the qual­i­ty nut but­ter. It is also capa­ble of mak­ing marzi­pan from almonds. This proces­sor also can chop nuts into coarse or fine powder.

Blend­ing: Although the food proces­sor’s pri­ma­ry job is to chop and mix even­ly fine­ly. It is pos­si­ble to use S‑blade to make smooth­ies because it can puree, and blend­ing is also a puree­ing process, but the blender will do this job bet­ter. The man­u­fac­tur­er also warns that this machine is not designed for crush­ing ice, so if you use it to make smooth­ies, you bet­ter allow the frozen ingre­di­ents to thaw a lit­tle before pro­cess­ing them.

Knead­ing Dough: This appli­ance does not come with a knead­ing dough hook, and the man­u­fac­tur­er does not advise using it for knead­ing bread or piz­za dough. How­ev­er, the S‑blades are per­fect­ly capa­ble of mix­ing cook­ie dough, pie crust, and pan­cake batters.

How­ev­er, you can mix dry dough ingre­di­ents, oil, and eggs using the Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor and fin­ish the knead­ing process by hand.

Grind­ing: Although a few users use this food proces­sor for grind­ing grains, herbs, and cof­fee beans, the man­u­fac­tur­er does not advise using this device for such tasks.

Shred­ding: The shred­ding side of the Shredding/Slicing disc can grate car­rots, beets, onion, cab­bage for mak­ing coleslaw or sauer­kraut, pota­toes, and cau­li­flower for cau­li­flower rice or cheese. It han­dles bet­ter for shred­ding hard, such as ched­dar, Mon­terey Jack, or Swiss or well-chilled cheese.

Slic­ing: The slic­ing side of the Shredding/Slicing disc is designed for slic­ing a vari­ety of veg­gies and fruits such as cel­ery, cucum­bers, apples, mush­rooms, car­rots, pota­toes, cab­bage, toma­toes, pep­pers, and radish­es. It also can slice well-chilled cheese or pep­per­oni. The slicer has only one thin size; for exam­ple, if you slice pota­toes, it comes out like card­stock paper thin.

Assembling/Disassembling and Cleaning

Assem­bling: This food proces­sor is easy to assem­ble, dis­as­sem­ble, and pre­pare for the oper­a­tion. For assem­bling, you have to line up the bowl and base and turn the bowl clock­wise until you hear the click. Next, place the S‑blade or Shredding/Slicing disc (there is a stamp on each side that indi­cates the Slic­ing or Shred­ding func­tion) onto the motor shaft, and close the lid by align­ing it with a bowl and turn clock­wise until the click. Nev­er use force while assem­bling because it can break the parts, and if you did not shut the lid cor­rect­ly, you might have a prob­lem open­ing it.

A built-in safe­ty mech­a­nism pre­vents the machine from oper­at­ing if the bowl and lid are not prop­er­ly installed.

Clean­ing: All the food proces­sor parts, exclud­ing the base unit, are top-Rack dish­wash­er safe, so it is not a prob­lem to clean it after use. How­ev­er, if you would like to extend your device’s ser­vice life, it is bet­ter to hand clean it.

Additional Features

Col­ors: Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups is avail­able in 1 col­or, black, and silver.

 Volt­age sys­tem: The device sold in North Amer­i­ca is rat­ed at 110–20 volt­age. If you need to buy the machine with a 220–240 volt­age sys­tem, buy it from the local retail­ers; oth­er­wise, the war­ran­ty is not cov­ered by the con­tract if you use it over the volt­age transformer.

Dimensions

Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups has a very com­pact 10.25″ x 8.43″ foot­print and a pro­file of only 15.47″ (to the top of the feed­ing chute). So it will not take up much of the counter space and eas­i­ly fits under any kitchen cab­i­net. It weighs just 6.9 and is very easy to move around.

Warranty

It comes with only a 1‑year lim­it­ed war­ran­ty for defects in mate­r­i­al or con­struc­tion. The lim­it­ed war­ran­ty means you have to pay the ship­ping cost in case of send­ing it for repair or replace­ment. So it is worth­while to buy the extend­ed war­ran­ty on the food proces­sor that is not expensive.

Noise

Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups is a noisy machine. It releas­es 87 — 94dBA, depend­ing on the processed ingredients.

Pro and Cons

Pros

• This Food proces­sor comes with a work­ing bowl scrapper;
• Pow­er­ful motor for such an inex­pen­sive machine;
• It is the cheap­est prop­er food proces­sor on the market;
• It per­forms very well basic food pro­cess­ing tasks such as chop­ping, shred­ding, and slicing;
• It is easy to use and easy to clean;
• The gad­get comes with suc­tion caps;

Cons

• Lim­it­ed attach­ments selection;
• It is a loud food processor.

Price

Almost all retail­ers offer a mod­el for a price well under $100. For this price, it is not sur­pris­ing that the food proces­sor comes with a lim­it­ed selec­tion of attach­ments with­out a dough hook. How­ev­er, this machine has a mighty 450 watts motor for such a price.

Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups — Bowl Scraper, via Amazon

Summary

Although Hamil­ton Beach Food Proces­sor 10 Cups — Bowl Scraper comes with a lim­it­ed selec­tion of attach­ments. Though, it per­forms all essen­tial food pro­cess­ing tasks very well, which is more than enough for a basic home food proces­sor. It also has sev­er­al use­ful fea­tures, such as a pow­er­ful 450 watts motor and food scrap­per that helps mix ingre­di­ents inside the work­ing bowl more efficiently.

Indeed, there are a few much bet­ter food proces­sors out there on the mar­ket, but they are going to cost you much more. Thus, if you are on a tight bud­get, this device is more than worth­while adding to your kitchen appli­ance collection.