Black+Decker HC150B Review

The Black+Decker HC150B ranked at the back of the pack, doing much worse than the Ninja Express Chop and slightly worse than the Cuisinart CTG-00-SCHP. On the whole, we also weren't fans of the Cuisinart, but it has a few redeeming factors that give it the edge on the Black+Decker, like a far superior performance when it came to chopping tomatoes.

Onions

We tasked each chopper with chopping half of an onion. Depending on the onion, this can be a bit more than the Black+Decker can handle, but we managed to fit a quartered smaller half-onion without too much difficulty.

The Black+Decker required a few extra pulses to successfully break down some of the larger onion pieces, which unfortunately meant a non-trivial amount of the chopped onions were completely pulverized. The chopped onions produced by the Blackd+Decker were also the most watery of the bunch, indicative that they were more crushed, rather than chopped. All in all, it was quite difficult to get a consistent chop with this product — we only really achieved it when we pre-cut the onion, and at that point, you might as well just cut it by hand.

Carrots

The Black+Decker food chopper did quite a bit better with carrots, delivering an overall average performance. We used a whole raw carrot snapped into thirds for this test and the Black+Decker handled it reasonably well. It chopped the bulk of the carrots, but once the bottom began to fill in with chopped carrots, the blade struggled to catch some leftover larger pieces at the top of the bowl.

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However, the top popped open once while we were testing it right as we let go of the pulse button, which gave us a bit of a cause for concern.

Garlic

This chopper overall couldn't mince garlic as consistently as the Cuisinart or the Ninja, and there were more larger pieces leftover, even after six pulses. The Black+Decker also left the garlic slightly discolored and a little rougher looking than the other products did.

Tomatoes

For our next evaluation, we tested how well each mini chopper handled half of a tomato. None of these food choppers did terribly well, tending to puree or crush the tomatoes rather than truly chopping them, with the Black+Decker doing the worst of the entire group. A large portion of the outer part of the tomato got stuck in the bowl while the insides got completely mutilated. We even kept running it to see if it could adequately puree the tomatoes and make something similar to salsa, but it didn't really do all that well at that either.

Nuts

The performance of the Black+Decker improved a bit when we tasked it with chopping a half cup of almonds, but it still ranked the lowest out of the entire group. This model basically just spins the almonds around a bunch, rather than actually chopping them up, and it left the most whole almonds behind out of all the mini choppers.

Cilantro

We ran the Black+Decker for 15 seconds with a half cup of cilantro, and it didn't really do much, mainly swirling the cilantro around rather than chopping it. Running it even longer, it reduced the cilantro to more of a mush or a paste, rather than dry, finely chopped leaves.

Ease of Cleaning

The Black+Decker was the easiest of the group to clean. The blade lacks any nooks and crannies that are hard to clean out, unlike the plethora of blades that the Ninja has, which make cleaning them by hand a rather harrowing experience. The bowl is about average to clean, and it is dishwasher-safe, as are the blades.

Conclusion