Breville BBL550XL 5-Speed Blender

Our venerable KitchenAid blender gave up the ghost shortly after my wife plunged into a regimen of twice-daily smoothie making. Fired up with missionary zeal about the benefits of these frozen concoctions, she felt compelled to replace the still-smoking hulk with something more powerful. Naturally we turned to Epinions and read about the Breville Ikon blender - and based on the generally positive reviews here, she scurried out and purchased one at our local Bed, Bath & Beyond store. With a 20% off coupon, the blender rang up at $199.95 - hardly cheap, but a worthwhile investment if this appliance proves to be as bomb-proof as reviewers suggest.

We'll never get a chance to evaluate the durability of the blender, because after three increasingly unsatisfactory days of experimenting, we returned it. Although undeniably nice in many regards, the Breville Ikon failed to deliver on the most fundamental aspect of a blender - it didn't blend very well at all. Instead, it excelled in almost instantly creating a smallish vortex of pureed ingredients, surrounded by an unmoving, untouched, and decidedly un-blended mass of food.

We tried rearranging the sequence in which we plopped ingredients into the cannister. We tried using different speeds. We tried turning the thing on and waiting. In the end, we were inevitably reduced to stopping the blender, opening the cannister, and manually shoving the un-blended ingredients closer to the blades. Then we'd reassemble the blender, power it on, and within 1-2 seconds it would create another small blob of blended stuff. Rinse and repeat - it often took 4 or 5 cycles to adequately process the ingredients.

I'm sorry, but life is too short for such nonsense.

A blender's sole raison d'etre is to, um, blend. Blend, as in "to combine". It's infuriating to me that so many of them fail at this elemental task. (Don't even get me started on toasters). Despite the Breville's sleek and sturdy stainless steel construction, and notwithstanding its 1000 watt motor, and regardless of its unique Kinetix blade and bowl system, the inescapable fact is that this blender is rather a pain in the a$$ when it comes to blending smoothies.

During the few days we owned this product, I noticed something else that concerned me: like all blenders with removable blade assemblies, the Breville uses a gasket to insure a leak-free seal between cannister and blade assembly. Where our KitchenAid blender had a beefy neoprene gasket that performed flawlessly for several years, the Breville gasket is a flimsy, easy-to-damage thing that appears to be made of silicone. Several reviews I read mentioned the ease with which this vital component can be inadvertently mis-installed and damaged, and after seeing the gasket, I can believe that could easily happen.

Obviously, a blender at this price point is not completely without merit: the Breville is powerful, relatively quiet, appears durable, and does some tasks quite well. You can reduce a load of ice cubes and water to the consistency of fluffy snow in a matter of a couple of seconds, which is kind of cool, but (once everyone's had their fill of frozen Margaritas and sno-cones) not particularly useful. The unique and scary-looking blade mechanism does a decent job of pureeing certain foods, but fails utterly in its primary claim to "hug the bowl contour to minimize food traps." To the contrary, in our experience, the system was remarkably capable of creating food traps: virtually the entire 1.5 liter cannister (save a small area immediately surrounding the spinning blades) was a food trap.

We returned our Breville blender and bit the bullet: we shelled out for a Vita-Mix 5200. It's enormous, ugly, and loud as hell, but it has one huge advantage over the Breville Ikon: boy howdy, does it blend.