September 2011 Canadian Ratings This article appeared in September 2011 Consumer Reports Magazine. With an immersion blender you take the appliance to the food. You dunk it directly into smoothies, soups, and other fare. It also fits in a drawer, saving counter space. Our tests whipped up three top picks, including a CR Best Buy that ran circles around a pricey "professional" model for a fraction of the cost. We puréed chicken bouillon and vegetables for soup and blended frozen fruit and yogurt for smoothies, typical tasks for theseOur testers grated cheese, and chopped garlic and other foods with models that have a chopping option. Even the best immersion blenders aren't nearly as fast or as powerful as a countertop model, but they're a useful complement. Here's what else our tough tests revealed: 2 Miallegro, a CR Best Buy at $50, blended and puréed nearly as well as 1 Breville. In its chopping mode it grated cheese more finely for half the money.

It also left the $180 6 Bamix far behind. All three of our picks have an auxiliary mixing beaker, chopper assembly, and a whisk for beating. Metal parts that come off for cleaning are another handy item on all but the Bamix. But having three blade tips instead of the usual two made no difference As the Ratings show, the models with the highest speeds aren't necessarily the best performers. And although 3 DeLonghi is one of two machines with a high-speed turbo mode, it was barely faster than the nonturbo Breville. The Bamix and 5 Waring are two of the three "professional" models that were included in our tests. But neither the Waring nor the Bamix, with its heavy-duty parts, delivered when it came to performance.Ninja® Set of 2 16-oz. Single Serve Cups with Lids for Ninja® BL660 Pro BlenderOF the many primal noises to emanate from the modern kitchen — crackle, sizzle, “mmm” and so forth — “AAAGGGHHH!” is not one anybody wants to hear. But that’s what shattered the uneasy peace last July 4 at the white clapboard house my in-laws rent every year in Annisquam, Mass.The sound was coming from my mouth.

And the blood was seeping from my left index and middle fingers, which seconds earlier had been trying, with some absence of mind, to pry stiff clumps of butter intended for chocolate-chip cookies from the blades of an immersion blender. The countertop beneath looked like the set of Dan Aykroyd’s famous and gory Julia Child parody on “Saturday Night Live” in 1978.“I’ll never play the viola again,” was the first thought to flash through my mind. (I haven’t touched the instrument in 20 years.)Months after the surgical tape and splint came off, I typed the words “immersion blender” into Google — tentatively, as there is still some numbness — and learned of the device’s invention in the 1950s by a Swiss man, Roger Perrinjaquet, who called it a Bamix, combining the French verbs “battre,” meaning to beat, and “mixer.” Also known as a stick blender, a wand blender or (perhaps less felicitously) a hand blender, it’s a longtime staple of restaurant kitchens that has been taken up by the increasingly ardent home cook over the past decade.

Results have been, well, mixed. “It’s gained popularity from the smoothies,” said Dr. Keith Raskin, a hand surgeon and clinical associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the New York University School of Medicine, who estimates he has treated about a half-dozen immersion blender injuries, many of which involve severed nerves and tendons, in the past two years.pensonic blender pb 801 price Sold by most leading cookware manufacturers, including Cuisinart, KitchenAid and Hamilton Beach, the immersion blender sells for about $50 to $200 and enables the quick whipping-up of soups, sauces and other soft foods directly in the pan or serving bowl. ninja professional blender 1000 (bl610) reviewThe menacing mincer attachment, sometimes interchangeable with a whisk, snaps onto a footlong shaft and is powered up to several hundred watts with a soft button that responds to the gentle pressure of a thumb. margaritaville fiji frozen concoction maker recipes

Or a sea breeze, if you ask a few of those scarred by it.Because of the sensitivity of this button, it is very, very important that you unplug the gizmo before cleaning — or else grasp all too quickly why my 4-year-old son thinks it is called an “emergency blender.”Such a safety precaution seems obvious, right?vitamix tnc 5200 price ukNot to Brendan Fitzgerald, 30, a screenwriter whose run-in with an immersion blender last summer led his girlfriend, the novelist Kate Christensen, to post a recipe for a concoction she called Blood Pesto on her blog. (“With a mezzaluna, not an immersion blender, chop several large handfuls of fresh basil as finely as you can,” it begins, tellingly.)“When you hold the thing, it’s so trigger-happy,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in plaintive tones over the phone from Portland, Me., describing how his “horrible, guttural scream” was followed by seven stitches to his left middle finger after he attempted to untangle basil leaves from a plugged-in immersion blender.

“There’s something so innocuous about it,” he said of the gadget, which comes in colors like hot pink and teal. “It looks like a child’s toy.”Mr. Fitzgerald said he was not usually the one in the house who cooks, and this resonated; few would call me aces in the kitchen either. When a character in the recent Off Broadway play “Disgraced” said of his wife, “Keep her away from the ingredients,” my husband laughed knowingly. The immersion blender, he pointed out after my accident, is better suited for frothing cocktails than heavy-duty baking tasks. (He added jokes about Bloody Marys and “two fingers of rum” for good measure.)But I have several sisters in my foul-up. Erica Schrag, 29, a digital strategist in the Atlanta office of Edelman, a public relations firm, was also trying to cream butter, for pecan tarts, when the unfortunate occurred.“I kept saying it was my Liz Lemon moment — I’m going to die alone in my house,” said Ms. Schrag, adding that it took medical personnel five hours to “make sense” of her index finger, which no longer has padding.

She called it a zombie finger. “I was out of work for a week, and I type for a living,” she said. “I wound up using Siri to dictate most of my e-mails.” Upon returning from surgery, Ms. Schrag threw out the offensive tool, a gift from her grandmother — “though I should have kept it to ward off intruders” — and replaced it with a KitchenAid stand mixer. “I was like, ‘I’m not waiting for my wedding day,’ ” she said. Ashley Dolliver, 29, who works in advertising in Manhattan, has also replaced her immersion blender, with a less-threatening Magic Bullet cup mixer, after an experiment in making peanut-butter smoothies culminated in six stitches on her left index finger at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.“It was a SmartStick blender,” Ms. Dolliver said, naming a popular Cuisinart model, but “I feel very dumb. I gave it to a friend who’s a chef and was like, ‘You’ll do better with this than I will.’ ”And yet my friend Jason Hawkins of Brooklyn, a professional chef, reported needing to swathe his hand in Band-Aids after trying to remove celery fibers from an immersion blender blade while making soup;

he also told of a onetime sous-chef at Gramercy Tavern who was out of work for a few months after colliding with a leaf-blower-size Bamix.Mr. Hawkins passed the phone to his wife, Deborah Snyder, a former pastry chef who remembered a gruesome episode while helping to open Lever House, a Midtown restaurant that has since closed: an unseasoned assistant who went to clean an unplugged immersion blender wound up with “some ungodly number” of stitches.“I think those meat slicers are first when it comes to kitchen accidents, and then mandolines, and immersion blenders are third,” Ms. Snyder said. “People are just stupid with them.”As it happens, the cautionarily named SmartStick was mentioned in a lawsuit filed on Nov. 30 in the 23rd Judicial District Court of Louisiana against Conair, the parent company of Cuisinart, by Amy Desbory of Ascension Parish, La., who claims she suffered severe lacerations after one slipped out of her hand while she was working on a milkshake.“It’s a dangerous product — too easy to turn on unintentionally,” said the personal-injury lawyer representing her, Robert C. Rimes, who has hired a professor of industrial engineering at Louisiana State University to testify in the coming trial.

Mr. Rimes is seeking $50,000 from Conair to help defray Ms. Desbory’s medical expenses, and said he would not mind some product modification either. “When you’ve got a spinning blade, you’ve got to take certain measures,” he said, comparing the immersion blender to a power lawn mower.Without addressing the pending litigation specifically, Mary Rodgers, a spokeswoman for Cuisinart, cited the “warning verbiage” in large type on the handle of the SmartStick, difficult for its user to miss. “We’ve had discussions over the years about how maybe you could enclose the blade or something,” she said, “but the way the blender functions, the food has to be sucked up to where the blade is, so that hasn’t materialized.”After hearing of the accidents detailed here, though, Ms. Rodgers sounded ready to have a chat with the company’s product designers. “It makes me think I should suggest a minibrush that you could put in for cleaning,” she said.But “it’s like anything else,” she said.