By MARK BITTMAN
Published: September 14, 2010

IT’S sitting there, over on your counter or maybe, sadly, under it. Perhaps ignored, even forgotten. Yet the food processor — the darling of the mid- to late ’70s — is an appliance that can change the way you cook.
At least it’s changed the way I cook, by encouraging me to do things that I absolutely would not do otherwise.

The food processor replaces the whisk; the pastry cutter; the standing mixer (for which there are still some uses, but only if you’re a dedicated baker); the mandoline (which, to me, remains a fine alternative to the food processor for small quantities); the mortar and pestle, which, no matter how lovely, quaint and authentic, is perhaps the most labor-intensive, primitive and damnable set of tools in the kitchen; and, perhaps most importantly, the grater.

The tasks the processor performs are mundane, but that’s what cooking is mostly about. The difference between shredding your knuckles and straining your triceps with a grater and throwing a root vegetable in a machine is the difference between rarely making stir-fries of shredded vegetables and making them often.

When I found myself preparing these dishes three or four times a week, for breakfast (yes!), lunch and dinner — when I found myself shredding sweet and white potatoes, butternut squash, rutabagas and other things that I was way too lazy to grate by hand — I gave the food processor the greatest compliment possible: I upgraded its position in my kitchen from a cabinet to a spot on my itsy-bitsy counter.

I use it to grate a single sweet potato or a piece of butternut squash, which I then toss in a pan with garlic, other seasonings and some grated onion — done in the food processor, of course. I cook this for five minutes and have a better-than-average little meal. When guests come, I gussy the mixture up with a slightly more aggressive seasoning and serve it as a side dish.

I use the food processor for just about every pastry dough there is — and have for 20 years — and many batters (see, for example, the poundcake I wrote about in these pages on Aug. 25). I use it to grate enough Parmesan for 5 to 10 servings at a time. I purée cooked things ranging from chickpeas for hummus to root vegetables for slightly fancy side dishes. I make pesto and any other herb purée I can think of (same with salsas, and whatever other name you want to put on ground vegetables and herbs and fruits). I produce insanely good mayonnaise without paying attention (more on this later). And I cut far more even slices, far faster than I ever could by hand, of almost anything sliceable; I don’t do this for a single onion, but if there are more than, say, three, I turn to the machine.

You might correctly say “the blender can do a lot of those tasks,” but it can’t do all of them. Because the blender handles liquids so well, until recently there was an argument for both appliances. But some new food processors have water-tight seals on the top and bottom, so you can purée liquids for soups and drinks in them — making the blender an endangered species. (Unless, of course, you’re interested in puréeing rocks, vuvuzelas or iPhones, which third-generation blenders can do.) I have, therefore, demoted my blender to the closet, where it has stayed for a year or more. (I do use an immersion blender for vinaigrettes, though nothing else.)

Updated food processors from KitchenAid and Cuisinart incorporate similar innovative features that are nice but not crucial: a blade for grating cheese; a dough blade (and sometimes a “dough” setting on the machine itself); nesting, interlocking bowls of different sizes; adjustable slicing discs or discs of unusual depth; and more-sophisticated motors.

I’m indifferent to some of these; I still “grate” Parmesan with the default steel blade, and though it does not yield the lovely fine powder you get from a micro-plane, it does just fine. The interlocking bowls are nice for storage, but I do not use them sequentially to prepare meals, as the manufacturers suggest.

The improved bread dough capability, developed by Cuisinart with the help of Charles Van Over (a friend, and the author of “The Best Bread Ever: Great Homemade Bread Using Your Food Processor”) yields impressive results — his are the best home-cooked breads I have ever tasted — but I remain a no-knead fan. (If there’s a lazier way to do something, and results are comparable, that is where you’ll find me.)

But some new features are fantastic; I love the adjustable slicing disc. I don’t know what a “1,000-watt, direct-drive induction motor” means exactly, but these machines never stall. The different-size bowls provide a mini food processor built into a huge one.

With all of that said, there is nothing I make in my extra-large, super-duper, nearly state-of-the-art food processor that I don’t make in my considerably older and smaller one; it might take longer, and I would definitely feel constrained if I made dough in the little one, but for all the tasks that make the machine important to me, it’s just fine. (One of my machines is a Cuisinart, the other a KitchenAid. Though they’re not as impressive, I have often made do with 20-year-old machines.)

Besides what’s already been mentioned here, what can (and can’t) the food processor do? It can make flour from softer grains, like rice and rolled oats, but it cannot make flour from wheat or rye. (It can make what you’d call “meal” — a whole-grain addition to bread — or cracked wheat, for example, which cooks far more quickly than wheat berries.) It can whip cream, but not as elegantly as a whisk or a mixer. It can grind cooked or soaked legumes, but not raw ones, at least not well. It can produce nut butters, including those with added flavors; herb pastes, tapenade, baba ghanouj, salsas, seasoned oils and compound butters, but it’s only worth it if you’re doing a lot; grated chocolate; coleslaw; ground spices; puréed fruits and vegetables; superfine sugar from granulated sugar; ground coffee; and sorbet from frozen fruit.

The recipes here represent my favorite uses for the food processor: an apple tart; one of my little impromptu stir-fries; meatballs made from home-ground chicken (the food processor makes it possible to never buy ground meat of any kind); and an amazing split-pea fritter, adapted from Julie Sahni’s “Classic Indian Cooking.”

One more barely needs a recipe: mayonnaise.

Every food processor worth its name has a little hole in the “pusher” that plugs the feed tube. When the first Cuisinarts were introduced, this was an astonishing feature, because it allows mayonnaise to be made by a savvy five-year-old or an inattentive adult.

By-hand instructions for mayo require you to dribble oil — not quite drop by drop, but close — into an egg-acid mixture, while beating with a fork or whisk. It’s doable and it’s fun — once.

By machine, you put an egg, a tablespoon of vinegar, two teaspoons of mustard and some salt and pepper into a bowl; you put the top on and start ’er up; pour a cup of oil into the pusher, with its little hole, and go sip coffee or do yoga. The oil drizzles in, and you get perfect mayonnaise in a minute. That alone is worth the price of admission.

(Source: A version of this article appeared in print on September 15, 2010, on page D1 of the New York edition.)