Magimix Le Mini Plus Review

A tiny machine with a lot of power, the Magimix Le Mini Plus is an excellent choice for preparing meals for one or two people.

What is it?

Magimix makes some of the biggest, best food processors on the market, but if you only need to make quantities for one or two people then you might find the pricey larger models beyond your requirements. The diminutive Magimix Le Mini Plus is ideal for those who never make large batches but still want high quality, and are prepared to pay for it.

Related: Best hand blenders

Design and features

This is a tiny little thing. The bowl is just 1.7 litres, which is really small by food processor standards. That’s about big enough for two portions of soup. So if you’re cooking for a family, this will be of absolutely zero use to you. Not everyone is cooking for a family, though, and for smaller requirements, the Le Mini takes up very little room in a small kitchen. It will fit comfortably in a cupboard, but it’s so wee that it could live unobtrusively on your worktop. The footprint is about the size of a medium saucepan.

For its size, the Le Mini’s accessory selection is large. You get the usual knife blade and two discs, for slicing or grating at thicknesses of 2mm or 4mm. You also get an egg whisk, a citrus press (it has separate cones for small and large fruits), and a ‘Blendermix’ attachment to give a finer blend for veloute soups and smoothies. Most of those attachments fit in a separate storage box, which is handy.

As you’d expect from Magimix, the build quality is top notch. Just because you’re buying from the bottom end of its range doesn’t mean you’re buying inferior quality. There is only one automatic speed, which is less desirable than a speed you can control, but it did every job well.

Performance

Due to the food processor’s small size, it’s a bit like using a toy to start with. These impressions soon disappear when the quality of the Magimix Le Mini comes to light.

Having tested the top-of-the-range Magimix CS 5200XL, I know how well made the Magimix machines are. The Le Mini is no different and operates very quietly, and the blades are all so sharp that most tasks are performed very, very swiftly.

The main blade turned an onion into a fine dice in a few seconds. The smaller bowl was good for blending pastes, like Thai curry paste, which you only need in quite small amounts.

Grating and chopping performance were both excellent, reducing carrots to uniform coins and cheese to a very fine, even shred. The only drawback on its performance is that you can’t get much in the bowl, but that’s not so much a complaint as an observation.

The juicer was very good with oranges, giving much faster results than you could achieve with a manual juicer. However, it was no good with limes, despite providing a smaller cone specifically for juicing small fruits. The lid doesn’t press down firmly enough to get all the juice out of the lime, so I had to do part of it by hand.

Washing up was a cinch and took next to no time. Putting everything away was very easy thanks to the included storage box.

Why buy it?

For its size, the Magimix Le Mini Plus is expensive. You could buy a larger machine with comparable accessories for less than the price of this. However, what you’re paying for is quality, which this has in spades. Bar a couple of minor performance issues, chiefly on the juicer attachment, I found this excellent and would happily give it (a very small amount of) space on my worktop.

Verdict

A tiny machine with a lot of power, the Magimix Le Mini Plus is an excellent choice for preparing meals for one or two people.