Cuisinart DFP-3 Handy Prep 3-Cup Food Processor

I love this product, which is a powerful low noise small batch food processor, which is a replacement for the essentially identical Little Pro from Cuisinart -- but the company doesn't sell replacement parts for when the bowl eventually breaks!

I have been using my Cuisinart 8cup model(older version) for many years and I love it, however, I don't feel using it when I chop or slice only one onion, and large machine is not good at handling small quantity food. So I bought mini prep chopper for these small jobs and liked it for chopping and mixing but it doesn't slice or grate. Mini prep was small and light and it was not good at heavier jobs .Then I purchased this Handy Prep 3cup and it was perfect solution for my purposes. With little more investment, you can have same powerful motor as the larger models and you can have many accessories for chopping, grating and slicing . It has much heavier motor base than mini preps and because of its powerful motor, it sounds quiet. Here are what it does:Chopping: choop onions, parmesan cheese and other vegetables with ease. chop chocolate from small chunks (not from whole bar, though). chop nuts beautifully.Slicing/grating: DFP-3 comes with unlimited slicing/grating disc with chute attachment. This is very clever and fun idea that sliced/grated food comes out from the chute as you on/pulse the machine. You'd better put larger receptor under otherwise the food will fly away all over the kitchen counter. Slicing/grating discs are made of cheap looking plastic and only blades are made of stainless steel. To be honest, the larger model does neater jobs but DFP-3 does OK jobs for daily meals. You need to cut vegetables to adjust the opening. It is useful to have chute attachement as the second bowl besides work bowl. Hard food like carrots or hard cheese easily stack in the blade, when this happens, you'd better turn off tne machine not to burn the motor and re-arrange your food.Making pastry & pizza dough: It can knead small dough but for this job I prefer the larger model because 3cup bowl doesn't have enough room for kneading dough. Maybe it can handle 1 cup flour but it can make only one medium sized pizza. When I made pizza dough with 1 2/3cup flour and 1cup water, the dough didn't become smooth and elastic as I expected. As to pie crust, it can make nice pie crust with 2/3 flour, 2oz butter, 50g sugar and one egg york. For carrot cake or brownies, you can do the most part in the processor and transfer the contents into larger bowl for mixing flour because as the volume in the bowl increase, the capacity of the bowl becomes full and it doesn't mix bottom part well.As additional accessoried, you can purchase citrus juicer which was originally made for little prep pro (the former model of Handy prep). It comes with juicer attachment with 3 cones of different sizes. This attachment makes Handy prep 3cup more useful, especially, when you make marmalade.Hope this helps you. DFP-3 is my cute little power horse for daily jobs and I love this machine highly recommend it.

The unit is super-solid. Very powerful motor... you can tell by the weight of the base and the sound of the motor during operation. Very quiet and very smooth. Spins more slowly and runs a lot quieter than I was expecting. It's tank-like, in a small form factor.But it comes with several unfortunate drawbacks. First, you cannot use it with liquids AT ALL. Last night I tried making "Frozen Banana Fluff" and ended up with rice milk and cinnamon all over my counter and appliances (it required serious clean-up, as the milk and cinnamon were thrown over a wide area). I put in one frozen banana in chunks, 1/2 cup rice milk (well below the liquid "Max Fill" line), 1 tbsp flax meal, several dashes cinnamon, 1/4 tsp vanilla extract, and about 1/3 cup coconut milk. I was using the S-blade. The instant I turned it on milk and cinnamon sprayed out from the seam between the bowl and the cover.I cleaned up everything, then carefully reassembled the unit to try again (I'm a mechanical engineer by trade, and can assure you the problem wasn't caused by improper assembly). I wrapped my hands around the seam, hit the pulse switch once, and the same thing happened again (this time my hands caught most of the liquid).Here's the deal: When you turn it on, the liquid gets whirled around and forced up the side of the unit and comes shooting out the seam between the bowl and lid. Part of the problem is the diameter of the "skirt" on the lid that's supposed to help create a seal between the two (think of it as an insert that extends an inch down inside the perimeter of the bowl). It's undersized by about 3/16" compared to the diameter of the bowl (that's a lot). Another factor is the lid has two tiny nubs on the sealing surface to help ensure the lid stays fastened tight (plastic parts are often designed this way - it provides some tolerance to the design if the part warps slightly). The problem is that these nubs (about 1/16" tall) keep most of the lid's sealing surface from contacting the bowl. So if you combine the smaller lid diameter with the sealing surfaces that don't touch you've basically got a completely open path for the liquid to escape. And does it ever!Another drawback to this unit is amount of scraping you have to do to get solid food evenly chopped. I think this is because the blade RPM is so much slower than most processors. It doesn't throw the food around the way a higher RPM machine would do. So if you turn it on and leave it, the bottom part of the ingredients gets chopped/minced but not much of the top. To do it evenly you have to turn it off, open the unit, and scrape / mix the top ingredients into the ones at the bottom (the presence of the S-blade can make this a tricky operation). And each time you take off the lid you've got a mess to deal with upon reassembly because some of the food gets thrown into the sealing area similar to the problem with liquids mentioned above.When a unit has design flaws like this it introduces another major inconvenience. To finish what I was making last night I had to transfer everything to my Vit-Mix blender. So now I've got two appliances to clean. That's the problem, you reach for this little processor wondering, "Am I going to have problems with it leaking? Can it chop the way I need it to chop without making a mess, and without prematurely pureeing the bottom part of the ingredients before I get everything scraped down and mixed together?" So you roll the dice, find out it can't do what it easily should be able to handle, and now you've doubled your clean-up time (even more if it created a big mess along the way).Overall I give it an "A" for construction / durability / form factor, a "C-" for chopping and processing performance, and a "D" for unit design. 2-1/2 stars.