Save Time and Energy Slicing and Dicing With Our Favorite Food Choppers

Best Overall

Kuhn Rikon Pull Chop 2-Cup Food Chopper

Orig. $39 $32 at Amazon $25 at Walmart View on Abt.com

Lots of manual choppers have you push down to cut food, but the Pull Chop uses a unique method to spin its blades; it's a little like the pull-start on a lawnmower or chainsaw, only on a much smaller scale. After you load the bowl with food and seal the lid, you just pull the handle to chop. A non-skid ring on the bottom of the bowl keeps it from slipping, though you will need to use both hands at once with this model—one on the lid while the other pulls the cord.

The rotating blades work much like a food processor, chopping foods more and more finely the longer you spin them. In testing, the Pull Chop worked much quicker than expected, whizzing through everything from onions and carrots to tomatoes and mushrooms with ease thanks to its razor-sharp blades. It sliced cleanly through bell peppers as well, when many of its competitors simply crushed or mashed them. The vertically stacked blades had a little trouble, however, when loaded with only a few garlic cloves—we found it helpful to hold the chopper at an angle to encourage small amounts of food to fall into the blades.

This model holds about 2 cups, so it’s plenty for making a bowl of salsa or prepping individual ingredients for a recipe. Without any plugs and cords to worry about, the chopper is extremely portable: You can use the whole thing to carry finished dishes, or prep recipes at a picnic, campsite, or really anywhere. The lid lifts off easily, so emptying and reloading with more vegetables is a breeze. Everything but the lid is even dishwasher-safe, but we're not kidding about those blades being ultra-sharp. We sliced open a finger when taking them out for cleaning; be careful!

Dimensions: 5.5 x 5.3 x 4.3 inches | Weight: 0.9 pounds | Capacity: 2 cups

Runner-Up, Best Overall

Fullstar Vegetable Chopper

Orig. $50 $25 at Amazon $30 at Walmart

What started as an impulse purchase because it was on sale has turned into a go-to in our kitchen. This food chopper has helped us make salads in minutes and dice ingredients for dinner in seconds. There are four different attachments, including two cube-shaped slicers (one larger and one smaller) and two spiralizers (one for wider spirals and the other for thinner ones). The design allows for these to easily pop in and out, with a lock switch to keep them in place while in use.

The large, 5-cup container underneath the main chopper head is large enough not only to store all four of the attachments it comes with, but to fit lots of ingredients, like an entire can of chickpeas, an entire tomato, an entire onion, and an entire cucumber at once.

The blades are incredibly sharp—which is, of course, a good thing while you're using it since it makes it easy to press down...until it's time to clean them. We've nicked ourselves a few times but the two cleaning brushes and two cleaning scrapers come in handy to get small bits of food out, and this one is safe to go in the dishwasher on the top rack. All in all this food chopper does exactly what it is supposed to, is easy to store away in the cabinet, and is usually on sale.

Dimensions: 8 x 2.99 x 4.48 inches | Weight: 2 pounds | Capacity: 5 cups

Best Electric

Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus Food Processor

$40 at Amazon $37 at Walmart $40 at Target

Wherever the line is between food chopper and food processor, this little appliance sits right on it. It's surprisingly multifunctional for such a small, inexpensive machine, with a chopping mode that uses the sharp side of the blade and a grind mode that spins it in the other direction, letting the flat edge crush and purée. The chop and grind buttons both serve as their own pulse modes, too, since the blades only spin with the button pressed down.

We tested the Mini Prep with onions, peppers, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, and garlic, and it made short work of all of them. It chopped everything cleanly, though the size of the bits were somewhat uneven, especially when we wanted to keep things in larger pieces. Grind mode was surprisingly effective, creating smooth tomato purée and even peanut butter. You could use it to emulsify salad dressings, or make fresh baby food.

On top of that, the bowl, blade, and lid are all dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning. And you can choose from lots of different base colors (try multiple retailers to find more options). Plus, they even throw in a tiny little spatula to scrape down the bowl mid-chop.

Dimensions: 5 x 7 x 9.3 inches | Weight: 2.5 pounds | Capacity: 3 cups | Power: 250 watts

Best Budget

Zyliss Zick-Zick Classic Food Chopper

$21 at Amazon $22 at Wayfair $22 at Sur La Table

You use this inexpensive manual chopper by tapping the "button" on top: Each press pushes the blade onto the food beneath and rotates it a little bit to ensure a more even texture. There are lots of similar models, but the Zick-Zick's big innovation is its zig-zag blade, which performs more cuts per push than the more common X-shaped blade.

In testing, this model did well with onions, carrots, mushrooms, and tomatoes, though it had trouble getting through the skin of green peppers. There's a "wiper" mechanism that scrapes bits of food off the blade with each cut, which was very helpful with larger pieces of food but didn't keep small bits of minced garlic from sticking. The blade is completely covered with a plastic shroud when in use, and we felt very safe around this tool.

You can use the Zick-Zick directly atop a cutting board, or with the included cup, which keeps everything very contained (there's even a cover included so you can use the cup for food storage) but it is quite small. Either way, the process is very simple, and clean-up is also easy: Everything comes apart and is dishwasher-safe. We did note that the plastic parts of our test model got stained seemingly permanently by tomato juice; nonetheless, this didn't affect performance.

Dimensions: 3.3 x 3.3 x 8.8 inches | Weight: 0.8 pounds

Best Splurge

KitchenAid Cordless 5 Cup Food Chopper

$100 at Amazon $100 at Target $100 at Wayfair

Pretty much a full-sized food processor that's cordless, this KitchenAid machine is super-convenient to move around the kitchen, grabbing ingredients from the cutting board or fridge and moving them to the stove or oven (or even outside to the grill) without having to worry about plugging it in. KitchenAid says the unit can chop 40 full onions on a single battery charge, and we didn't run out of electricity during our testing.

This model did well with onions, nuts, tomatoes, carrots, and mushrooms. And despite its large capacity, its tall-and-narrow shape helped it thoroughly mince a small amount of garlic. We also used the faster of its two speed settings to purée tomatoes and grind peanut butter, and it did well with both. The only ingredient it had trouble with was green peppers; like a lot of the other machines we tested, it didn't always cut through the skin cleanly and wound up crushing some of the pieces more than chopping them.

There’s a handy pouring spout for dispensing liquids, and a drizzle hole in the lid that’s good for slowly adding liquid to emulsified sauces like Hollandaise. You'll also get a separate whipping blade for whipped cream or egg whites, which stores inside the bowl when not in use. And everything except the motor base is dishwasher-safe. Like many KitchenAid appliances, this one also comes in a variety of colors to match your kitchen or add a pop of color. The main downside is its cost; there are full-on food processors cheaper than this chopper.

Dimensions: 6.6 x 5.5 x 10.4 inches | Weight: 2.8 pounds | Capacity: 5 cups | Power: 60 watts

Best Self-Contained

OXO Good Grips Chopper

$23 at Amazon $23 at Wayfair Orig. $32 $23 at Jcpenney.com

Great for ingredient prep, this compact chopper incorporates its own measuring cup, which is even printed with measurements in cups and milliliters. The cup includes its own cover, so you can store your pre-chopped items in the fridge until they're needed, no extra containers are required.

Similar to the Zick-Zick above, the OXO chopper has a wave-shaped blade that chops and rotates each time you tap the button on top. You can use it directly atop a cutting board or with the cup, and it did a nice job with everything except green peppers in our tests. It's especially good for small items and small volumes, turning garlic cloves and nuts into evenly sized fine bits in seconds. Cleanup is super-easy, too: Everything disassembles and goes in the dishwasher. (You also get a little scraper/spoon tool that can remove any stuck bits if necessary.)

The problem is there's just not that much room under the blade. Whether using the cup or not, you'll have to pre-cut onions or other large veggies into small pieces before you can actually start using the chopper. (The chopper also comes with just a single cup, though you can buy extra cups for five bucks each.) Another less major issue is that the tomato juice stained the plastic parts with an orange tinge that didn't come off in the dishwasher.

Dimensions: 4 x 3.8 x 6.8 inches | Weight: 0.9 pounds | Capacity: 1 cup

Best High-Volume

Presto Professional SaladShooter

Orig. $75 $70 at Amazon $74 at Walmart $75 at Wayfair

SaladShooter is a very appropriate name for this machine: You load the chamber, point the barrel into a bowl, and press the trigger to get a steady flow of slices. It works by rotating a cone-shaped blade against the food, with a large chute that can accommodate whole veggies of many kinds and a plastic pusher to keep your fingers far away from anything sharp. It can handle a never-ending flow of ingredients, as long as you have room to hold the finished slices.

The ability to swap in different blades for different types of cuts makes the SaladShooter multifunctional, and this model comes with four: two sizes of shred, a standard slicer, and a ripple slicer that makes crunchy veggies like carrots and cucumbers look super-fancy. It's, of course, a boon for making salads, but the attachments also let you shred cheddar for a grilled cheese, potatoes for hash browns, or make perfectly even apple slices for tarte Tatin. On top of that, the blades and all the rest of the parts except the motor base are dishwasher-safe.

If anything, the SaladShooter might be too big of a chopper for someone who's not going to use it often or with large amounts of food. It's fairly bulky and heavy and has to be plugged into the wall, not really worth breaking out just for a handful of garlic cloves or a single cucumber. It's also pretty expensive compared to some of the others on this list.

Dimensions: 11 x 4 x 1 inches | Weight: 3.9 pounds | Power: 114 watts