KitchenAid KSM2FPA Food Processor Attachment, Dicing Kit, Silver

Bought this primarily for the dicing tool. Understand that it might be "commercial style", but this is not a commercial product, so keep your expectations in line. The feed spout, as mentioned by others is small, you will have to cut up most things (except maybe carrots) that you are putting through this thing. I mean, look at the size of the food processor compared to the size of the mixer. I had no trouble with dicing some red peppers, or carrots. A slightly soft onion did pose some problems, and the tomato I tried to dice was a disaster, but I didn't really expect that anything less than some kind of laser cutter would give me perfect diced tomatoes. The shredding attachment works great for carrots and apples, though obviously it's a slower device than my full-size food processor. If I had to slice a whole bunch of things, I'd rather use my full-size processor, but this is great for smaller quantities, and when you don't want to fill up the dishwasher with your giant food processor bowls, or make room on the counter for the food processor. I love that all the guts of this thing are dishwasher safe, because I hate washing things like this. It's not the most perfect slicer in the world, but it's a great time-saver if you can afford it. The fact that the blades and accessories come in a tidy box for storage is also great, because my full-size food processor's attachments end up all jumbled together in some kind of horrific bowl of sharp blades that may require a blood sacrifice if I'm not careful.For the occasional light shredding work, or slicing, it's great, but the real reason to get this is for dicing. I was able to dice up an eggplant, zucchini and some peppers in about 2 minutes, with minimal cleanup afterwards. The diced pieces are a little smaller than I'd like, but for the ease of use and speed and lack of personal effort, I'm not complaining. No regrets!

I had an opportunity to purchase the KitchenAid Food Processor Attachment using some rebates that I'd gotten from an earlier KitchenAid promotion and when i saw a sale for this i decided to give it a try. I'd been looking at it for some time because it was the only item on the market that would dice and not just slice items like my Cuisinart. I'd been looking at the various videos that KitchenAid had on-line as well as independent reviewers and had seen some really impressive results and listened to some very negative comments. It appeared that individuals that bought or reviewed the attachment either found it very helpful or totally hated it. Being an engineer i was curious to see the construction and worried about the mechanism's quality. So when i received the attachment I had to run it through some tests.The first thing I noticed was how heavy the attachment was. It's not a lightweight piece of equipment! So my first concern was about the stress the weight would place on the mixer. I'm still worried about that after several hours of use. Like any of the KitchenAid attachments it's a little noisy when running and there is some vibration. I attribute that to the causing what some reviewers said about the attachment 'falling off' the mixer. I don't believe that's an issue if one keeps in mind that vibration in any piece of equipment tends to loosen fasteners over time, particuarly friction secured fasteners like KitchenAid uses to hold their attachments to the mixers. My advice? Check the fastener for any sign of loosening if you're going to use it for a lengthy period of time.So on to the tests. First was a twenty pound bag of russet potatoes, peeled and sliced to fit the hopper. I found varying advice on the speed setting. What i discovered was that in general the harder the item to be sliced and diced the faster you want to set the speed. Potatoes took about a seven to eight setting while larger carrots I set to ten. Apples worked fine at lower settings. Tomatoes (I used Roma) worked well and seemed to do better at a medium speed. That surprised me at first, I was expecting them to do better at a lower speed because of their firmness, but I think it's because of the skin. I did not try any skinless tomatoes - that might be a test for another time. Cucumbers were best at a low setting (Note: I peeled the cucumbers in my testing and the softer they were the worse the results - English cucumbers worked the best for dicing). Another thing that I found interesting was that i got the best results when dicing if I DID NOT use the pusher to force the vegetables into the hopper - letting their own weight and the angled blade pull them in worked just fine. A big WARNING - don't try to use the attachment to dice meat - that was a disaster! I have not tried cheese yet and if (when) I do I'll add to this review.So the dicing aspects of the attachment worked better than i anticipated. Since that was my primary reason for purchasing it I was very happy.I moved on to the slicing blades and was interested to note the adjustable thickness setting on the slicing blade (KitchenAid calls it their ExactSlice System). That's an interesting touch and i wonder how long that's going to last. Endurance is just as important to me as functionality since I tend to keep my technology until it expires! I would have preferred a metal mechanism, but that would have necessitated a price increase that probably would have made the overall cost a nonstarter. It worked fine as did the shredding and julienne discs. I typically prefer my Cuisinart for those functions (so many more blades and options) but if I'm going to do dicing as well as slicing and julienne cuts the KitchenAid is my tool of choice.Next was cleanup. How labor intensive was that going to be? I found that cleanup was actually easier than for my Cuisinart. I should note that i clean my tools immediately after use, no matter which brand or device. I've learned my lesson from letting debris dry in hard-to-reach places! The KitchenAid came apart as easily as it went together. Most of the pieces came clean in just a spray of warm water and a quick dip into a soapy bath and rinse. A nice scrub brush gets almost anything off easily and KitchenAid has thoughtfully provided a small tool for clearing any food stuck in the dicing grid so you don't end up with bloody fingers. I also like that there is an insert that lifts out to protect the mechanism from any food particles or fluids that go around with the blades. That was a feature I hadn't really considered important until it came to cleanup - then that made things a breeze.The included storage case is nice, but I have two concerns. The first one is a little picky, but I had a difficult time in getting the blades back into the case so it would close properly. Turns out that the adjustable thickness slicing has to be in placed into the storage case with what I'll call the plastic sweeping tab rotated so it's located to the right of the case or it interferes with the closure. A picky concern, true, but I was beginning to think I'd lost my mind when the case wouldn't close the first time. Second, the location of the hinge for the case means that in the open position it does not rest on the surface, but is slightly elevated. I've seen the same design on other cases and the failure mechanism is when left in that position for too long or if there's an impact it damages the hinges. A very small design change would have alleviated the possibility with zero additional cost in either materials or fabrication.Overall I think this one's a winner!Concerns? Well, like all bladed kitchen tools how sharp they are tends to make a huge difference. I am concerned about how well the dicing grid retains its edge since there's really no way to resharpen it. I didn't look into the cost of replacement, but i suspect it's not cheap! The other blades? Well, they seem to be the same quality as the Cuisinart's, and I've used those blades for at least ten years without issue.

When we first opened the box we were quite impressed with the unit. We liked the variety of the disks that came with it, and we were very happy with the ability to change the depth of the slices as the unit was running without needing to change blades.The first thing we tried was the dicing blades to dice some onions. It made easy work of the onions, however, the chute was so small that we needed to quarter the onions before we could feed them through which increased the prep time, but overall we were happy with how it functioned.Next we tried to shred some potatoes for potato pancakes/latkes. Again, the chute was so small that we needed to halve small potatoes just to feed them through, and would likely need to quarter large ones just to fit. Unfortunately the motor was chugging a lot and the unit was definitely having difficulty & straining under the task. I was worried that my motor would seize up on my mixer. I took off the lid to ensure nothing was wrong, and noticed that a large chunk of potato was left unshredded above the blade, and a large chunk of shredded potato was stuck under the blade. There is a little bit of 'wiggle' on the blade and it allowed the food to push the blade up/down and get clogged vs. being pushed through the blade and out the bottom. A lot of the potato juice ended up going up/out the sides of the inner unit into the closed housing as well which I'm assuming would eventually leak into the sealed housing. We cleaned it up and tried it again, with the same result.We are using this unit on the KitchenAid Professional Plus 550, 575 Watt mixer. It is one of the more powerful mixers out there in the residential line, and still was struggling with this unit attached.We have the KitchenAid peeler/spiralizer and it makes quick work of processing foods with no audible straining of the motor. I would not trust this food processor unit on my mixer as I'm afraid either the unit itself would break, or worse, the KitchenAid motor would seize. I don't think it's just that the potatoes are hard to cut through since our spiralizer attachment makes quick work of slicing through them. I think it's a function of this processor clogging up and putting strain on the motor.Overall we are not happy with the unit and will be returning it for a refund. We're pretty disappointed because we usually love the quality of KitchenAid products, and we were really excited to get this unit because of the continuous feed functionality. We've been using a DeLonghi food processor for years that we've been very happy with, but wanted the additional benefits of continuous feed and dicing. We'd been looking at the Warner Commercial Dicer and Robot Coupe dicer and were not wanting to spend that kind of money, so we were really hoping this would work since we have already invested in the mixer, and various other KitchenAid attachments. I think we'll need to end up spending the extra money and go with either the Robot or Warner unit for a dedicated processor.The unit comes with a lovely box for storing all the blades etc, but they would have been better spending the money on upping the quality of the unit itself instead of putting it towards fancy packaging and storage. If you were only using this for very soft foods like precooked potatoes, tomatoes, onions, cucumber etc it would probably be fine. If you don't need the continuous feed you'd probably be better investing the money in a quality stand-alone processor.

This is a very confusing attachment to use. If you don't use it on a regular basis, you have to refer to the book to remind you how it goes together. The shredder makes a mess and does not shred cabbage fine enough for coleslaw. . The dicer does not dice small enough if you are wanting to make a relish and it will not dice things like tomatoes , apples or peppers(for your relish) . It turns most fruits /veggies into a slaughtered mess. It is a pain to get back into the storage box that it comes in. It is not easy to clean. If it worked well, it would make big projects easy, but for daily use, it is far too much hassle to dig it out and figure out how to get it to work for a small task.I am very disappointed!

I used the attachment through my canning and dehydrating. It diced my carrots , onions and celery beautifully for dehydrating mirepoix for this winter along with other vegetables. I found with soft veg - slow - hard like carrots you can use full throttle. I used the slicing blade to do cabbage and onions for sauerkraut and coleslaw. It performed perfectly. I have not used the shredding blade yet. I find is really easy to clean if you do it right away.