If you are planning to use your food processor only for tasks that require relatively little power (such as slicing a cucumber or other soft vegetable), then a budget-priced model may serve your purposes. Chances are, however, that you also want your machine to perform more arduous chores, like chopping meat, in which case a budget model is no bargain.

A key reason that a budget-priced food processor is ill suited for chopping foods like meat is that it does not have enough horsepower. If the motor is not powerful enough, it is apt to balk momentarily, or even permanently, when you process a heavy load.

Another reason for poor performance is that many budget-priced models are belt-driven. In other words, the motor turns a belt, which turns the cutting-blade unit. The belts in inexpensive models tend to slip when you process a heavy load. This problem doesn't occur when the motor's drive shaft directly rotates the cutting blade, as is the case with most of the better food processors.

Motor-balking and belt slippage are major mechanical deficiencies because they make it impossible to chop a batch of food uniformly. What inevitably happens in the case of beef, for example, is that when some of the meat is properly chopped, the rest of the meat is too lumpy (underchopped) or too pasty (overchopped).

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