bamixThe Master Chef GL200 Pro-3 - White

We have had several immersion blenders from the local department and kitchen goods stores. They were adequate in their operation and provided needed services. For Christmas 2011, our daughter-in-law mentioned that she was looking into the Bamix immersion blender. We purchased it for her for Christmas and were blown away by its size and operation. Since our cheaper version of immersion blender deep-sixed just before Thanksgiving, I decided to get one for my wife.They are not cheap by any measure but what you get is definitely the cadillac of blenders. The GL200 Pro is exactly that, a professional model with a long neck, powerful motor, and accessories to meet practically every need. Used it recently to blend a pot of split pea soup and it only took a few bursts of power to blend all ingredients.This blender fits right in with our other appliances, Vita-Mix blender and Kitchen-Aide mixer, all with the power to accomplish any task.Amazon's price was also a selling point for us.If you want a workhorse for your kitchen needs, this is a necessity.

Excellent quality product that you should not buy. The problem is that it ships with blades [not even a complete set] that are more or less unsharpened. Countertop blender blades have some sort of sharpening-they are not really sharp and they are not really blunt. The Bamix chopping blade is absolutely blunt. There is talk on the internet about how maybe Bamix now ships with blunt blades for " safety", so that home cooks do not cut fingers changing blades. What happens with a blunt blade is that food is smashed up and not cut up. If you are blending food with fiber like yams, celery, ginger, etc., then the fiber stays in the soup as strands. When you buy Bamix, you now spend a lot of money and get a blender that works well blending soft fully cooked food, but fails the challenge of blending food that is not soft.

I tried to like this unit but it was just too much money for too little performance increase over basic consumer immersion blenders. Performance gain was really just a longer sealed shaft and bit more power than my consumer grade 10 year old Cuisinart. I returned this and bought the 1/2 horsepower Waring commercial for less money. The Waring is big but if you are looking for pro for a home kitchen it is the way to go. On my single use before returning, the Bamix got quite hot just pureeing white bean soup. The Waring made short work of the same job with ease and power to spare and did not overheat.

This immersion blender beats the pants off of trying to blend large amounts of ingredients in a classic blender. My wife was making soup without one of these and it was a nightmare transferring liquids. With the Bamix in hand she can grind up a large or small batch of ingredients with little fuss. The size of this is nice because its tall enough to go into a large pot but small enough that you can still wield it easily in a small saucepan.I also use this to make smoothies. As long as I use a big enough glass, this thing can shred up some fruit and protein powder into a delicious shake in 15-20 seconds. Cleanup is so easy, I love it.The Bamix is surprisingly quiet. You can barely hear the motor whirring when you spin it up. It is nice to use such a powerful tool and not have to cringe every time you start it because of all of the racket it makes.With the included mount, I was able to hang this thing inside of one of my cabinets without taking up any cabinet space.

The Bamix does a good job of mixing liquids and thick liquids. I use it mainly for making 9 days worth of smoothies at a time. It doesn't do quite the volume that I had anticipated. It does have a drawback that needs to be mentioned, because anyone with food allergies needs to be concerned when this product is used. It doesn't bother me, but the mechanical connections are difficult to clean perfectly. The chopping blade has two vertical cuts on the cylinder that fits over the mixer shaft that give it just enough flexibility to be able to slide it onto the shaft yet still allow it fit firmly. I'm not sure if you call that a splined assembly or what. There is also a ridge around the shaft around which an o-ring fits, and the blade assembly goes over that. Once you've put the blade on and off a few times, it gets easy to do.Unfortunately, sometimes substances get into those spaces on the blade and are hard to see, and somehow also work their way into the space between the shaft and the blade. Occasionally you will see a particle of whatever you were mixing on or around the o-ring. It's a mechanical fit, and it's not perfect. It works perfectly for a mechanic, but for a biological system, it could be a problem. It is possible to clean the removable blade. If allergies were important, you could even boil it and dislodge even the tiniest particles. But you can't do that to the o-ring around the mixer shaft. Other than the o-ring, it is theoretically possible to clean that part of the shaft, the end of it, perfectly. This would only be a concern to maybe one in a million customers, but someone who might suffer an anaphylactic reaction to even trace amounts of foods such as nuts or seafood should be concerned.If you have this at your home, it would presumably not be a problem, since you would know the history of your use of it. If you eat out, though, particularly if you eat out at an expensive restaurant, where a Bamix might likely be used, you ought to be concerned that the chefs might be using this device without even considering the possibility of cross-contamination. They might take the easy way out and clean it without even taking the blade off. It would never occur to them that the seafood they pureed yesterday might have left traces on the Bamix that get into whatever they're pureeing for your allergic son. They're certainly not going to take that o-ring off to clean it.I'm also not particularly loving the fact that there is that o-ring at all: rubber and its analogs are not friends with heat, and, if you use the Bamix for hot mixtures, you will accelerate the rate of decay of that o-ring.As I said, this doesn't bother me for my personal use. The problem of stuff getting in between the blade and the shaft might be exacerbated by the fact that I mix a lot of powders into my smoothies. But at even the most expensive restaurants, I would wager that not even one in a hundred chefs would even think about the possibility of contamination via whatever was on that mixer shaft. You could tell them how serious your child's or your allergy is, and get every promise in the world that there is no way they would allow even one molecule from such a food to get into what they're getting ready to fix for you, and they would be completely sincere, not to mention completely puzzled and astonished when the ambulance is carting your child away.One other thing: it might not bother most people, but you do have to be careful when mixing even on glass if you touch the bottom of the jar or container you're doing the mixing in. The metal of the shaft or blade will leave marks on the bottom of your container.