You use your food processor to chop and julienne ingredients like nuts, meat, and vegetables.

Sweet potatoes and other hard root vegetables can be processed easily in high-quality food processors. Cooked sweet potatoes can be combined with milk, butter, and salt in a bowl or food processor after cooking.

We’re here to respond to all of your most pressing inquiries regarding slicing potatoes in a food processor. In the section that follows, we’ll go over how to use your food processor to chop, mash, and even shred potatoes as well as whether or not you can use one to prepare sweet potatoes as well. Keep reading!

How Does Food Processor Work?

A food processor is the ideal kitchen tool if you’re not particularly skilled with knives.

Cutting attachments for a food processor range from multi-blade choppers to slicing discs. To use a food processor, you first insert one of the cutting attachments inside the plastic bowl.

On the motor base, you’ll find a pulse button that you manually hold down and release to deliver quick bursts of chopping and slicing power. Alternately, you can turn on one of the cutting modes to continuously chop ingredients. Depending on how quickly or slowly you want to break down your ingredients, you can choose from a variety of speeds in some food processor models.

Simply remove the cutting blade from the disc, insert it, and feed your ingredients through the feed chute on the lid to use it. Depending on the model, the position of the cutting disc can be adjusted to various slicing thicknesses. Read More: Food Processor vs. Mixer – Which One Should You Choose?

How to Use a Food Processor to Slice Potatoes

Now that we’ve established that it is possible to use a food processor to slice potatoes, let’s go over the procedures above in more detail. For the majority of food processors, these guidelines should work.

Step 1:

Always start with clean potatoes, so wash them first. If your potatoes are incredibly dirty, you may have to scrub them. For this, a vegetable brush like the OXO Good Grips brush will work better than a typical kitchen sponge.

Clean dishtowels or paper towels should be used to dry your potatoes after washing them in cool water.

Step 2:

Next, peel your potatoes if your recipe specifies that you should. Keeping the skin on is necessary when making homemade potato chips or French fries, but you don’t need it when making scalloped potatoes.

You could use a knife, but use caution if you do.) or a potato peeler to remove potato skins. Some chefs even boil the potatoes until the skins just fall off, but depending on the potato dish you’re making, you might not want to do that because it pre-cooks the potatoes.

Step 3:

Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces. Halfing your medium-sized potatoes should be sufficient. Cut the halves in half and possibly split long pieces lengthwise for larger potatoes. When slicing your potatoes, consider the load that your particular food processor can support.

Step 4:

Then, insert your potatoes into the opening after turning on your food processor and opening or removing the lid. Push the plastic plunger in so your potatoes go through to the blade. We advise adding one potato at a time to the food processor.

Step 5:

Put your potato chunks through the food processor once more if they are still too large.

How Do You Keep Homemade Potato Chips Crispy?

Take the example of making potato chips at home with a food processor. You are overjoyed with how well they turned out. You save some of them for later because you don’t eat them all the first night. The chips are limp and soggy now, a day or two after you made them. Oh no!

What happened was that moisture or extra frying oil got to your chips, softening them, making them less crispy and more potato-like. You have two options for preventing this issue in the future.

First, blot your chips on paper towels to absorb any remaining oil after you remove them from the oven and give them a chance to cool. So that moisture cannot enter, keep them in an airtight container after that. Even days after you’ve made the chips, they’ll still be crispy!

How Can You Slice Potatoes Thinly Without a Food Processor?

Let’s say that you want to slice potatoes finely, but you don’t have a food processor. What are your alternatives?

You can make precise cuts, for example, using a chef’s or a butcher’s knife. Start by halving a clean potato lengthwise. Then, position your knife so it’s horizontal across the potato. Use the back of your knife’s blade to guide your cuts as you work your way down the potato from top to bottom.

A mandoline is useful if you want a quicker and more reliable way to cut your potatoes into uniformly thin slices. This one from Mastertop has non-slip rubber feet and a stainless steel blade. Turn the knob to adjust the thickness of the blade.

You can cut to 3 millimeters, 4.5 millimeters, 6 millimeters, or 9 millimeters. With a mandoline like this, you can produce thick-cut potatoes or julienned potato slices.

How Else Can You Cut Potatoes in a Food Processor?

If you believed that the only thing you were capable of doing was slicing potatoes in a food processor, you were mistaken. You can also use your food processor in these creative ways.

Mash

Mashed potatoes are a great side dish with many meals, from steak to poultry, not to mention their prominent place on most Thanksgiving dinner tables.

In order to properly mash potatoes in a food processor, Cuisinart has a great YouTube video. Use potatoes that have been thinly sliced, and fill the food processor with them until it is about one-fourth full.

Repeat this process, adding more potatoes each time, until all of them have been processed. The food processor should puree the potatoes.

Dice

Especially when you add cheese or spices to them, diced potatoes or small potato cubes are utterly addictive. Another option is to mix a few handfuls (or several handfuls) of diced potatoes into a delicious potato salad. How exactly do you dice potatoes?

For your food processor, you will require a dicing grid. Then it’s just a matter of feeding the potatoes through until they’re tiny, perfect, delicious squares!

Shred

You must be able to shred potatoes if you want to prepare classic hash browns or a cheesy potato casserole. A shredding disc is a further appliance you’ll require for your food processor. Potatoes can then be sliced as thin as 3 millimeters.

Can You Slice Sweet Potatoes in a Food Processor?

We’ve discussed dicing, slicing, and shredding regular potatoes. But what about sweet potatoes, which are their orange counterparts?

All of the recipes for regular potatoes, including those for homemade chips, French fries, and hash browns, also work with sweet potatoes. Be careful and use a sharp knife if you are going to cut your sweet potatoes into pieces that will fit into the food processor. Sweet potatoes are notoriously difficult to cut.

Food Processor Vs. Blender

When comparing blenders and food processors, many people find it challenging to tell the two apart. There is one significant difference between them despite the fact that they operate in a similar manner—a high-speed rotating blade breaks down food ingredients.

Liquifying ingredients in a blender is its main function. Soups, milkshakes, and smoothies are among the things you’ll see people make in blenders. However, you can make ultra-smooth or super-chunky soups and smoothies in a blender using the pulse function.

A food processor and a blender function slightly differently. They are not used for liquifying ingredients, though you can make soups and salsas in a food processor by letting the blades spin a bit longer than usual. Almost all cooking ingredients are prepared in food processors before being placed on the stove.

Things You Should Avoid Putting in a Food Processor

Therefore, despite their hardness, sweet potatoes are safe to process in a food processor. But what should you keep out of a food processor?

Hot Food Items

A food processor’s common cutting attachment has a plastic core. Particularly if you fill the bowl higher than an inch, extremely hot ingredients like soups and recently toasted nuts can cause the plastic core to melt.

Frozen Meat

Food processor blades can become dull from frozen meat. Before shredding the meat in a food processor, let it warm up to room temperature (or nearly there).

Bones

No matter what, never put bones in a food processor. Unbreakable animal bones will undoubtedly dull the blades if frozen animal meat can.

Too Much Liquid

Although a food processor can be used to make soups and smoothies, your blender is best for liquifying ingredients. Alternatively, you can install a blender attachment on your food processor’s base.

Ginger

Ginger is the ideal illustration of the kind of food you shouldn’t put in a food processor by itself. It has tough fibers that the blades will fail to break down completely. Pre-chop ginger before placing it in your food processor, alongside any other ingredients you want to break down.

Conclusion

If you want to make dishes with thinly-sliced potatoes to impress your friends and family, you need a food processor. Prior to placing the potatoes in the food processor, you will need to clean and cut them, but after that, the machine will handle the rest. You can prepare potato dishes like never before right now!

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