Very helpful. Review on Philips Intelligent Food Processor HL1659

I bought this few weeks ago. Its build, 750wt engine, its design are so intelligent. Especially the slicer is very useful. You can actually set the slicer so that you decide how thin or thick you want a vegetable to be cut. This feature is lacking in other food processors.

I bought this in Shoppers stop in a sale event for 7775/-. Its original price was 8565/-.

Two important pointers, which were not there in the manual book. I did not have any demo, so I have no clue on how to fix these. Thats why it might be useful to someone to get started.

1.When you put the bottom part for using the food processor, I did not understand on how to get it clicked. Tip: You have to use slight pressure to get it clicked and the first part of 00s come on screen below.

2.In order to start the machine, the second set of 00s also should come. For this, I was confused a lot. I put the handle on top, but 00s were not coming. Finally I figured that after putting the handle in place, you have to press it down, then the second set of 00s come and you are ready to go.

3.Some times I see the big 00s and if I press buttons, nothing works. At that time, if you click on MODE, the small 00s come back and all the buttons work.

I found the grating attachments are not useful to grate dry coconut. I think may be they are useful to grate vegetables like carrot, I did not try that yet.

I did few experiments on how to cut dry coconut with this. Finally I figured out that, putting slicer on top and mixer blade inside, are useful combination to cut dry coconut. I used the same combination to slice jaggery, it really saved lot of effort.

For making upma, I used the same combination to cut all vegetables like capsicum, carrot, mooli, aloo, onion. I made them really small pieces. My son ate upma very happily without complaining. If the vegetable pieces are big, he will leave them all and not eat even one.

I did not use the juicer yet. I used the small grinder, its very powerful. Ya, if you put very hard stuff in it, it might move and the handle bar comes off and engine gets stopped. I dont find any difficulty holding it for a few seconds, even though handle bar was supposed to do that. There will always be few exceptions, but otherwise the handle bar works perfectly fine, you can leave it hands off.

I find this machine really useful. Dont expect it to work like a robo. Then you will be disappointed.

Cleaning it is also very easy. Ours is a small family of 3, but still I find it very useful on a daily basis.(somebody were complaining that it is useful only for bigger crowd)

Update May 2 2011:

For mixing atta, I used the grating blade instead of the plastic blade(I read on the internet about this tip). It was so easy, within seconds the atta is ready.

Cutting Tindoras(Dondakaya):(set the slicing blade to the minimum possible gap)

Usually cutting these takes at least 45 minutes and frying them takes another 45min. I used the slicing blade to cut Tindoras in less than 5min. What I did was, you make them stand as a group, and then stack another group on top of it. Start slicing, as soon as the bottom group is cut, stop. Again stack the group on top, then again slice the bottom group. This way its so easy. Stacking the bottom group is little challenging as some tindoras fall down. Even if they fall down, no problem, they will be sliced very nicely, so there wont be any problem frying them. This one thing alone makes buying this Philips processor, worth every rupee.

After cutting vegetables, cleaning the dish is so easy, it takes about 2 min.