Blends hot foods and crushes ice Noisy on top speeds It’s safe to say that when KitchenAid says it’s reinvented the blender, it’s not kidding. The Artisan Magnetic Drive is barely recognisable from earlier models, its diamond-shaped jug being the only clue. But one thing is certain – it isn't any less powerful.Its stainless-steel blades are driven by magnets hidden within the base, ensuring that while the jug-base unit connection on other blenders may wear out and fail, the Artisan Magnetic Drive Blender will continue to perform at its best.Since the design places the blades lower to the worktop, and its die-cast metal body is well balanced and weighty, this blender is also more stable – it can blitz through practically anything at speeds of up to 16,500rpm.With a jug similar in shape to the brand’s Diamond blender – both for easy scraping out and to assist with the blending vortex – the Magnetic Drive Blender is every inch a KitchenAid, uniting established product design with new technology.

Devotees will still find plenty that's familiar, however, such as its availability in a huge range of colours (Candy Apple, Empire Red, Almond Cream, Frosted Pearl, Medallion Silver, Cast Iron Black and Onyx Black), retro styling and intelligent speed control with soft start.The bottom of the BPA-free pitcher is sealed and flat, sliding onto the base in one smooth motion. A lock-in handle holds it securely in place. Inside, differently angled blades ensure that no food escapes them, and the jug is topped with a push-on sealed lid.Above, a chute with removable funnel allows you to add ingredients whilst the blender is in operation, and a measuring cup fits into it as an extra lid. At the front, there’s a control wheel for preset programmes – Icy Drinks/Smoothies, Milkshakes, Soups/Sauces and Juice – as well as an option for pulse and constant variable speed.In the centre, a Start/Pause button controls the programmes, so there’s no need to worry about accidentally turning the wheel and it starting by itself.

There’s no recipe book in the box, but there’s the option for owners to send off for one.For those familiar with how a blender functions, be aware that the Artisan Magnetic Drive Blender works a little differently. As a result, it’s best to practice the action of sliding the pitcher onto the base a few times to make sure it locks in properly before you add any food. The control wheel’s central button will flash to indicate when it's in place correctly and the blender is ready for use.Honeywell Air Purifier Bad SmellI started by using the Icy Drinks/Smoothies programme to crush ice. Kittens For Sale In Camden NjWithin seconds of adding a handful of ice cubes to the jug, it had been blitzed to small pieces with only slightly more time required for it to be reduced to fine, fluffy snow. Savannah Cat For Sale Corpus Christi

While the programme usually runs for just over a minute, it was clear that this extra time wasn't required, so I stopped it early.Next, I added milk, raspberries and blueberries to the pitcher before setting it on the Milkshake programme. This began slowly to blend the fruit, before speeding up to incorporate it. Not only was the resulting milkshake evenly blended, it was also incredibly thick, with the consistency of a drink that included a banana. While there were traces of seeds from the berries, there were no lumps of fruit remaining.Moving on to the Juice programme, I first added small chunks of orange and set it blending. This was a particularly loud programme, rising to a pitch that drowned out conversation, but the orange juice it produced was worth it. As a drink with pulp it was fantastically smooth and thick, while it could also be sieved to produce a good quantity of pulp-free juice.Finally, we tried the Soups/Sauces programme by filling the pitcher with hot soup made from a variety of roughly chopped root vegetables.

Starting gradually, once the main chunks of vegetables had been combined into the mixture, speed increased in stages until the programme ended and the soup was made. The blended soup was velouté smooth, but so thick that it was tricky to pour from the jug. Here, the faceted sides came in handy, making it easy to scrape out the majority.Cleaning up was effortless. While it is easy to rinse or wash by hand as you go, all the parts of the blender that food comes into contact with – the funnel, measuring cup, lid and jug – are dishwasher-safe, making it convenient as well as clever.With few parts that will wear out, a high-powered motor and a pleasing robustness, the Artisan Magnetic Drive Blender may be the only such unit you buy for years to come. For keen cooks, and those who regularly like to make cocktails and smoothies, it's well worth the outlay. But if you blend only occasionally, this model may not offer the best value for money.With little that hasn’t been considered in its design, operation and user experience, the KitchenAid Artisan Magnetic Drive Blender is easily one of the best such products I’ve ever tested.

OF 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. 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. The 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.

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?Not 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.