I Say Nuts to Chopping Nuts. Anyone else?

[Porthos]

The nut pieces won't be of equal size - is there any chopper which does that?

 

I am not looking for truly uniform - just somewhere in the ballpark. When I have tried using my food processor i have had every size from just chopped once to nut flour.

 

The only time the processor has worked out for me is for my pecan bourbon balls. I need 4 cups of medium chopped pecans for the coating and 4 cups of pulverized pecans for the balls themselves. I process about a cup and a half at a time and then use a coarse-weave strainer to separate the over-chopped (heading toward pulverized) from everything else. Under-chopped pieces get pulled from the strainer, then the contents get dumped into a bowl. Repeat until the 8 cups of nuts have been processed.

 

 I will most likely get the chopper from Williams-Sonoma (yay birthday money). They have a brick-and-mortar store about 5 miles from my house. I buy many things from Amazon and other on-line sites but for something I may choose to return if I'm not satisfied I prefer brick-and-mortar stores. Living in southern California makes that choice rather easy. If I am satisfied with the chopper then I can start buying whole nuts from Costco.

[Toliver]

Two words for you: Slap Chop

[haresfur]

Time to revive the Chop-O-Matic?

 

https://youtu.be/FGo7W_mbWCE

[Edward J]

• You can "Cheat" a bit when chopping nuts with a food processor.  Here's how:

Toss in a about a cupful of nuts, blitz for a few seconds then pour into a bowl.  Repeat.

Now shake the bowl and all the finer chopped nuts will settle to the bottom, scoop off all the once-chopped nuts and toss back in the processor, blitz again.  Not saying it will be perfect, but it will even things out a bit. 

 

Works well when I have to process 10-15 lbs of hazelnuts at a time...... 

[MSRadell]

or put them through a nut chopper like this.

We have one similar to that, the top of square instead of round and is opened on the top but other than that it looks very similar. It works great for chopping nuts. The only disadvantage is there is no way to just what size it chops them to. The pieces are a little smaller than what you normally chop them to with a knife but they work perfectly for cookies etc.

[andiesenji]

Recently when I needed a cup or so of chopped pecans I started thinking about shopping for a nut chopper.  I ordered the top-rated model http://www.amazon.com/PL8-Nut-Chopper-1405/dp/B00JLIKD1I/ref=sr_1_3?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1444826162&sr=1-3&keywords=nut+chopper from Amazon.  What a disappointment!  It didn't even come close to evenly chop, it reduced most to a powder.  Next time was in that situation I remembered the Slap Chop that I bought a few years ago.  It did the best job of anything and much easier than using a knife.

I have that nut chopper and it works great for me.  I only use it for the coarse chopping, have never turned it the fine direction.

[Nancy in Pátzcuaro]

As a child I grew up with a mother who didn't like to cook, but she was an OK baker. Her technique was to break nuts by hand, which as haresfur said is quite meditative. If she was in a hurry she put nuts on the counter and crushed them with her hand. To this day that's what I do when a uniform consistency isn't necessary. I like the different sizes in something like banana bread.

 

I also, though, have a Zyliss chopper that I bought years ago because I loved the name--Blitz Hacker, though I don't know if that's the correct spelling. It also reduces nuts to what I think is the right size with a minimum of nut dust. You just have to stop in time.

 

Nancy in Pátzcuaro

[pastrygirl]

Boy am I a sucker.  I expend way too much effort getting nuts into the desired size pieces.