Can the Ninja Kitchen System Pulse make dough?

Food choppers are handy for small food-prep tasks, like dicing vegetables, chopping nuts, and grating chunks of cheese. When it comes to kneading dough, however, we generally think of stand mixers or full-sized food processors. So we were intrigued by the Ninja Kitchen System BL201, a $65 chopper that promises to "knead fresh cookie and pizza dough in seconds." Consumer Reports decided to put the claim to the test.  

Cookies. We started with Nestle's classic Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe. The Ninja's 5-cup container couldn't accommodate the full recipe, so we halved it. That solved the space issue, but the dough ended up dry and crumbly, more like shortbread dough than the moist, buttery texture that yields chewy chocolate chip cookies. Upon closer inspection, we noticed small globs of butter that had not properly creamed with the sugar. The cookies that came out of the oven were also inconsistent—some dome-shaped and puffy, others flat and dense.

Next, we tried a chocolate chip cookie recipe from the Ninja website. While similar to Toll House's, the ratio of ingredients differed slightly, as did the order in which they were incorporated. The butter and sugars combined more evenly, giving the dough a smoother consistency. The cookies themselves were better, too, though they didn't quite live up to buttery, chewy ideal of the best chocolate chip cookies.

Pizza. For the pizza dough, we again started with a common recipe, this one from the Joy of Cooking. As with the cookie dough, it had to be divided in half. The results were mediocre—dense and tough, instead of smooth and elastic. We then tried Ninja's flatbread pizza dough. The results were much better, as the dough developed adequate gluten, rose nicely, and had a relatively chewy texture.

Bottom line: the Ninja Kitchen System Pulse can make decent cookie and pizza dough, especially if you use the manufacturer's recipe. But the small container can be a bit of a nuisance on large, multi-batch jobs, and the end results might never be as good as those produced by your favorite recipe in one of our top-rated stand mixers or food processors.

—Sara Brown, Senior Technician