Bamix – The Master Chef GL200 Pro-3 – White

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.