Ninja chopper test

I am testing the Ninja™ Master Prep™ Professional (their italics, not mine), the ultimate food and drink maker, model #QB1004 30.  In this post, I am specifically using the “bowl”, the smallest unit of this 3-unit set.  It is basically meant to be used as a chopper, as in chopping onions, so that is what I used to test it.

Here you can see the chopper bowl with 3 ounces of red onion in it.  The first two things I noticed that aren’t really in the owner’s guide are the difficulty of assembly of the unit.  The guide simply says, “Place the splash guard on the bowl.” What it does not say is there is only one way the splash guard will fit.  Without this information, I tried to push the splash guard into place.  It took me several tries before I realized the splash guard must be turned to align with parts of the bowl before it will fit in place.  I also could not get the power head to fit onto the splash guard.  After the problem with the splash guard, I decided to keep rotating the power head until it fit into place.  Therefore, there is a mark against the Ninja™ for omissions from the owner’s guide.

With the onions, blades, splash guard, and power head in place, I pulsed the unit 4 times.

If you look closely at the picture, you will see a few larger chunks in the upper portion of the picture.  What you cannot really see is the onion at the bottom of the bowl is almost liquified.  This may diminish as the blades dull with use, but it is definitely too much power to simply chop an onion.  Also, no matter how hard I tried, I could not get all the onion pieces out of the machine and into my dish.

Upon adding the chopped onion to my dish, I discovered more nonuniform pieces, as pictured above.  The smaller nearly liquified pieces browned so quickly in my sauté pan they almost burned, while the larger pieces remained on the raw side.  Had I not been raised eating raw chopped onion as a child, this may have bothered me more than it did.

In conclusion, the Ninja™ is a powerful machine with some frustrating instruction flaws.  Its performance on chopping is simultaneously overzealous and inconsistent.  Given the choice between using a chef’s knife and assembling and washing 4 machine parts, the waste (albeit small), and having to use a chef’s knife to make the onion small enough to fit the machine anyway, I will select the knife over the Ninja™ every time, at least for chopping onions.  Garlic might be another story, though.

The next test I will perform will be of the 48-ounce pitcher to make a smoothie-style drink.

As always, I welcome your comments.  Click on the Comment link below; it may say "No" or have a number in front of it.