Wonderful and Functional Addition to a Kitchen

Author's Rating:

Pros: Easy to use, lightweight, durable, high-quality design.

Cons: Not a replacement for a heavy-duty blender such as a VitaMix

The Bottom Line: 
If you prepare baby food, soups, or sauces, this item is a time saver.

Author's Review
Due to dietary restrictions (wheat product, additives and artificial flavors), I avoid most processed foods. It is simply too time consuming, and impossible in some cases, to determine the actual ingredients in many processed foods.

This is where the Braun MR-5500 comes in handy. In the amount of time it takes to read (and sometimes look up) the many non-food (preservatives) and food-like (binders, gums, sweeteners, preservatives, chemically modified oils and other ingredients, I can simply mix my own sauces and dressings. By doing so, I guarantee freshness, nutritional content, and know exactly what I am eating because I do not add any artificial color, preservatives, non-food binders or flavor enhancers.

My most frequent use of the Braun is to make stir fry sauce from fresh ingredients (garlic, ginger, olive oil, peppers of various kinds, curry) or to make salad dressing from equally fresh ingredients.

There are many other uses for the product and clean up is a snap. Just run the unit in a glass of water with a drop of detergent, then rinse. 2 minute clean up. What could be simpler?

The really nice thing about the design of the Braun unit is that I only need to rough chop the ingredients down to the size of a peeled piece of garlic. I then simply place the dry and wet (usually oil or water) ingredients into a mason jar or jelly jar and blend. The blade produces a nice homogenized mixture, not unlike the sauces and dressings you find in the store. Your results are as fresh as the ingredients you purchased, not factory processed and weeks old in a preservative solution.

This small, lightweight appliance has many other uses such as baby food prep. and soup puree.