HotMix Pro Hot Mix Pro - Gastro

Works really well so far. Seems very reliable.

This deserves 10 stars. Finally, I can produce chef-quality sauces and soups at home. The built-in recipes are excellent, but very easy to modify. Note: you can modify them on the fly from the console, you do not have to edit, and you do not have to work with the SD card using your laptop. I download and print the pdf versions of the recipes, and just make notes on the printed sheets as I develop my customizations. Eventually when I am convinced I have the changes perfectly in-hand, I will store them on the SD card, but for now my hand-written notes are perfect, as I constantly edit them. I have modified the recipes to make everything lactose-free, and the results are amazing. This is hands-off, robotic cooking. You design the recipes or use the built-ins, you shop for and ready top notch ingredients, but the HotMix does all the work. The ingenious "WAIT TEMP" instruction, plus the mixing paddle which works in tandem with the cutting blades, is what makes this so much more than simply a heating blender. And you only have to pay attention when it beeps (that's when you add ingredients), so I get a lot of work done on my laptop in the kitchen while "cooking".I have made "cream" of broccoli, of carrot, and of corn (Lactaid Milk plus EVOO takes the place of cream) soup which people have raved about, a fantastic orange-apple-cranberry relish (my wife says the best she has ever had, and all I did is dump the ingredients in all at once, and let the machine bring the liquids to a boil just long enough for the cranberries to pop perfectly), plus a classic red sauce for pasta (again, my wife says "best", and she is Italian!). My only failure so far was a turkey-based brown gravy with red wine ... a little too salty, but I know what I did wrong and will get it right next time. Often I have add to add a little thickener at the very end, I make a roux with flour and lactose-free butter, and that does the trick.If you love to cook, and know how, you might have no use for this. However if you love to eat, and want someone else to do the fine cooking for you, but there is no "someone else", then this is the answer. And if you can't take the time to watch over your pots and pans in use, then again this is the answer. Finally, if you love to experiment, and you build spreadsheets of all possible ingredient measurements and substitutions (am I the only one who runs fractional factorial designs to find the perfect combinations?) then you can't live without this. Save up for it -- expensive, but worth every penny IMO.