You rely on your food processor to slice and dice ingredients like vegetables, meat, and even nuts. Tonight, you’d like to prepare a finely-sliced potato dish. Instead of cutting the potatoes by hand, it sure would be convenient to use your food processor. Can your food processor slice potatoes? We’ve researched this to find out.
You can certainly use your food processor to slice both firm and ripe potatoes, and here’s how:
- Wash your potatoes.
- Peel the skins off if necessary for the dish.
- Cut the potatoes into halves or thinner, smaller pieces.
- Feed your cut potatoes into the food processor one by one.
- Push down on the plunger, so the blade slices the potatoes.
We’re here to answer all your biggest questions about using a food processor to slice potatoes. Ahead, we’ll discuss how to dice, mash, and even shred potatoes using your food processor and whether you can use a food processor on sweet potatoes as well. Keep reading!
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How to Use a Food Processor To Slice Potatoes
Now that we’ve established that you can indeed use a food processor to slice potatoes, let’s elaborate on the steps above to get started. The following instructions should apply to most food processors.
Step 1:
You always want to start with clean potatoes, so wash first. If your potatoes are incredibly dirty, you may have to scrub them. You don’t want to use a standard kitchen sponge for this, but a vegetable brush like the OXO Good Grips brush will do the job.
Wash your potatoes with cool water and then dry them with a paper towel or a clean dishtowel.
Step 2:
Next, remove the skins from your potatoes if your recipe calls for it. Making homemade French fries or potato chips will require you to keep the skin on, but for scalloped potatoes, you won’t want the skin.
You can use a knife (be careful if you do!) or a potato peeler to remove potato skins. Some chefs even boil the potatoes until the skins slip right off, but depending on which potato dish you’re making, you might not want to do that because it pre-cooks the potatoes.
Step 3:
Slice your potatoes into manageable pieces. If you have mid-sized potatoes, cutting them in half should suffice. For bigger potatoes, cut the halves in half and maybe split long pieces lengthwise. Think about your particular food processer and what kind of load it can handle when cutting your potatoes down to size.
Step 4:
Plug in your food processor, open or remove the lid, and add your potatoes into the opening. Push the plastic plunger in so your potatoes go through to the blade. We recommend feeding one potato into the food processor at a time.
Step 5:
If your potato pieces are still too big, put them through the food processor again.
Here’s a handy video illustrating the above steps if you want to see a food processor in action slicing potatoes.
That YouTuber used a Cuisinart food processor. You may want a Cuisinart too, such as this 14-cup one in appealing black.
How Do You Keep Homemade Potato Chips Crispy?
Let’s say you used your food processor to make potato chips at home. You couldn’t be more thrilled with how they turned out. You don’t eat them all the first night, so you set them aside for later. A day or two after you made them, the chips are now soggy and limp. Oh no!
What happened? Moisture or excess frying oil got to your chips, softening them up, so they’re more potato-like than crispy. To prevent this problem in the future, you can do two things.
First, after your chips come out of the oven and get a chance to cool, blot them on paper towels to remove any leftover oil. Then, keep them in an airtight container so moisture can’t get in. Your chips will stay crispy even several days after making them!
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 options?
For one, you can use a chef’s knife or a butcher’s knife to make precise cuts. First, take a clean potato and cut it in half lengthwise. Then, position your knife so it’s horizontal across the potato. Begin cutting from the top of the potato to the bottom, relying on the back of your knife’s blade as you go.
This YouTube video shows you how it’s done.
If you’re not sure where to put your chef’s knife when you’re not using it, then you won’t want to miss this post: How to Store a Chef Knife? [3 Must-See Locations]
If you want an easier and more foolproof way to slice your potatoes into consistently thin slices, a mandoline comes in handy. This one from Mastertop has a stainless steel blade and rubber feet that won’t slip. Turn the knob to adjust the thickness of the blade.
You can cut to 3 millimeters, 4.5 millimeters, 6 millimeters, or 9 millimeters. Whether you want to slice julienne or get thick-cut potatoes, you can with a mandoline like this.
How Else Can You Cut Potatoes in a Food Processor?
If you thought slicing potatoes in a food processor was all you could do, that’s far from the case. 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.
Cuisinart has a great YouTube video about mashing potatoes in a food processor. You want to use finely-sliced potatoes, adding them to the food processor until they’re about a quarter of the way full.
Run the food processor and add more potatoes, repeating until you go through them all. The food processor should puree the potatoes.
Dice
Diced potatoes or small potato cubes are utterly addictive, especially when you add cheese or spices to them. You can also toss a handful (or several) of diced potatoes into a delectable potato salad. How exactly do you dice potatoes?
You’ll need a dicing grid for your food processor. Then it’s just a matter of feeding the potatoes through until they’re tiny, perfect, delicious squares!
Shred
If you want to make traditional hash browns or a cheesy potato casserole, you need to know how to shred potatoes. You’ll need another food processor accessory, this time a shredding disc. You can then slice potatoes as thin as 3 millimeters.
Can You Slice Sweet Potatoes in a Food Processor?
We’ve talked about slicing, shredding, and dicing regular potatoes, but what about their orange counterparts, the sweet potato?
All the recipes you use regular potatoes for–such as homemade chips, French fries, or hash browns–work for sweet potatoes as well. If you are going to slice your sweet potatoes to fit into the food processor, make sure you have a sharp knife and that you’re careful. Sweet potatoes are notoriously difficult to cut.
Curious what else you can put in a food processor? Don’t miss this post: Can You Dice Vegetables in a Food Processor?
Conclusion
If you want to make dishes with thinly-sliced potatoes to impress your friends and family, you need a food processor. You do have to clean and cut the potatoes before putting them in the food processor, but then the machine will do the rest for you. Now you can make potato dishes like never before!
