There’s no doubt about it, food processors have brought convenience to the home kitchen and since their inception many years ago, they have grown in leaps and bounds in terms of their applications.
In light of its versatility, can a food processor crush ice? To answer it in short, a food processor can crush ice and you can get different consistencies from ice for cocktails all the way to find shaved ice which looks and feels like snow.
That being said though, there is a downside to using a food processor to crush ice and I will get into that a bit later on in this article.
So, you want to make a cocktail or slushie. You probably want to make a frozen dessert and it involves crushing some ice.
Is it possible or safe to do it in your food processor? Technically speaking, for your food processor to be able to crush ice, it needs to be powerful enough and have a strong enough blade. Blenders are better suited to crushing ice and even there, only a few models actually do the job well.
Specific Models in the Philips HR series of food processors come with blending bowls that are better suited for crushing ice.
In fact, on their website, they warn against using the normal chopping blade in the food processor because using it to crush ice will blunt its blades.
How to Crush Ice in a Food Processor
If you have a powerful enough food processor as well as a strong enough blade or blending bowl as in the Philips food processors, you are now ready to go.
However, you are not just going to throw in the ice and crush it just like that. You need to do it in the right way so as to minimize any risk of damage to your food processor as well as to get the best results possible.
As already mentioned in this article, you run a high risk of damaging your food processor as it was really not designed to do handle this task.
So how exactly do you put ice in your food processor?
Put in a reasonable amount of ice in the food processor because this job will be heavy on the motor. Once you’ve loaded the food processor, the next thing to do is use the pulse function.
For crushed ice suitable for cocktails, you only need to pulse 4 to 6 times if you are using a powerful machine like the Ninja Professional 1500.
If you are going for a finer consistency like shaved ice, start off by pulsing until you break the ice down into really small pieces before letting it run and crush the ice further into a really fine snow consistency.
The Downside of Using a Food Processor to Crush Ice
Technically speaking, you can use a Food Processor to crush ice but there are some disadvantages to doing so. First of all, the blades of most food processors are not made to crush ice, they are made for chopping food.
They won’t be thick or strong enough. You will have to buy a special ice crusher for models that support it but even that will not handle ice as well as you would want.
Think about it as adding a modification on a vehicle that was not designed for it. It can do the job but it may be at the expense of something else.
If you use a regular food processing bowl, the ice will scratch the work bowl badly given that it was not primarily made to crush ice.
It is also very loud with almost unbearable noise levels it would help a great deal if you use one of the quietest food processors. To wrap it all up, it is generally not advisable to use food processors to crush ice.
You will get better results using a blender especially the Vitamix range of blenders which are made of much stronger materials in comparison to most of the food processors on the market.
Final Thoughts
My advice is not to risk damaging your food processor unless it’s one of the models mentioned in this article or you can use these food processor alternatives. I hope this article has helped you make the right decisions. I always appreciate your thoughts and inputs in the comments section below.