I found the only magical thing about this product is how it made $40 of my money magically disappear and left me wondering … what happened?
I recently saw the infomercial for The Magic Bullet and bought one from my local hardware store for $40.
The Magic Bullet is essentially a small blender “slash” food processor. But it just has one tool - namely something that looks like the combination of the tool you find in a blender and the one you find in a food processor for chopping.
The infomercial claims this product is something you will use “every single day” and can make any of its many recepies in “less than 10 seconds”.
What a bunch of hooey!
Half the recepies I tried just wound up with the ingredients “clumping” at the top of the container and they would never come in contact with the blade.
It would have been a waste of the $40 - except that I bought it at a hardware store that advertised “satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded”.
If you are tempted to buy one of these, I strongly recommend you only buy it from a store that will let you return it for a refund if you are not satisfied with the way it works.
I think they sell most of them to people who are enticed by the infomercial, then use it once or twice and then never use it again. What a dumbass waste of $40.
It worked fine with things that were almost entirely liquid. But then, a blender would work on those things without problem. If you have a blender, save yourself the money and just use your blender. It is no more difficult to clean a blender than it is to clean this thing.
If you don’t have a blender and are considering buying a Magic Bullet, I would advise you to buy a blender instead and forget about things like, “Chopped Chicken Salad” and “Guacamole” and “Tuna Salad”. You can make all those things by chopping things with a knife and not using any machine at all.
We have one and my wife indeed uses it every single day, to make a breakfast shake. You are absolutely correct that it sometimes doesn’t blend very evenly. We rarely (if ever?) use it to make anything other than blended fruit drinks.
The only thing I like about it is that it’s easy to clean. I find it easier to clean than our blender, but maybe that just means our sink is too small.
I have a cheaper knock off one and it was a gift so I was out nothing, but I do use it a lot for smoothies. I still get a couple random large chunks in my smoothie though. I wouldn’t buy the Magic Bullet or it’s slicer thing though since I doubt it would be any better than what I have.
If you do a lot of blended drinks and smoothies on a regular basis, it is wonderful. Because you can just pop it in the dishwasher there is no “I’d make a smoothie, except I don’t want tot have to handwash the blender” deterant. Also, since it has a much smaller footprint, I can afford to leave it conveniently on the counter instead of putting it away, which is another thing that keeps my blender mostly unused.
We use ours for mixed drinks almost exclusively. We can do pina coladas, margaritas, and daquiris at the same time without needing three blenders. Plus, it blends a helluva pesto.
One of my friends LOVES LOVES LOVES this gadget, so much so that she mentions it every single time I see her. She claims to use it every day and she is so vociferous in her support that I wonder if she’s not a commissioned Magic Bullet representative. In fact, I think she just bought one for me as a housewarming gift, even though I told her not to bother.
But other than her, everyone else I know who’s used the Magic Bullet did not like it.
I have the $25 Sunbeam knockoff and I use it all the time–I like salsa smooth, for example, and I like to blend several types of it together to get the taste I like and I dig that I can blend up a nice batch of it then put a lid on it and stick it in the fridge until I need it. I also make cashew butter in it, works great. Also great for small batches of whipped cream, say if I make an Irish coffee but don’t want to go to the hassle of getting out the mixer just to get a couple tablespoons of whipped cream to top the coffee. It’s a good little machine, my only quibble is that the gasket on the blade attachment split a bit so it leaks sometimes but that’s my bad for not finding a replacement.
I like my Magic Bullet and use it a lot. I don’t make drinks/smoothies, but I use it as a blender for making salsa, chopping garlic, making breadcrumbs- stuff like that. I like the way you put the stuff in the container and invert it over the blades. When you’re done, the container and the blade part completely separate, and the blade component is very easy to clean. I also have a VitaMix, but the blades are hard to clean because it’s all one piece. (Of course, the VitaMix is so powerful, you could make a smoothie with airplane parts if you wanted to.) And with a regular blender you have to unscrew the blade part- it just always seemed very messy to me. I thought it was well worth the $$, and I paid $60 for mine.
My wife also uses it daily for smoothies and making small amounts of hummus. I’ve used it a couple times to shred cheese (good for hard cheese). Everything else attempted has been complete fail.
My wife bought one of these a couple of years ago, with the idea that our son could have fruit smoothies any time. It’s not a bad solution for that sort of small-scale blending. It cleans up pretty easy, especially compared to a traditional blender. Having said that, we’re on our second “base” unit after the first one seized up (replaced under warranty), so I don’t think much of the build quality.
The base unit of ours is still working fine, but the plastic “gear” on the bottom of the blades (that interlocks with a similar “gear” on the base unit) seem to wear out pretty fast.
I’ve mentioned this product on here before because I love the infomercials. I love them because they are so full of shit that I can’t believe people would buy into what they’re saying.
All the ingredients for every recipe are on the counter, in bowls. The meat is cooked and chopped. The onions are peeled and quartered. The garlic is peeled. All of the work has already been done well in advance, of course it only takes “one, two, three” seconds to make chicken salad. All of the prep work is done in advance!
My wife bought one. My daughter uses it for milkshakes; that’s it.
After reading this thread yesterday, I had to laugh at a Magic Bullet reference I saw.
I was watching “United States of Tara” last night, an episode from earlier in season two, and the daughter talks about several things she wants, and one of the items is a Magic Bullet. They then cut to the son who is preparing a salad and the first thing he says is “I’m so sick of all this slicing and dicing.”
She ends up getting the MB and gives it to her brother and in the end I couldn’t tell if they were just being ironic (Diablo Cody isn’t usually very subtle in this regard) or if it was just blatant product placement.
I believe there have been documented scientific studies conducted by reputable scientific-thingie places that prove that if you watch an entire informercial all the way to the end it is impossible NOT to buy whatever crap…er, PRODUCT they are selling.
So it is vitally important that you turn off the infomercial at least 4.3 minutes before it is over. You must escape while you still have the power to do so. Otherwise you will be caught in the tractor beam and will be helpless against the gravitational field.
Nah, I actually like watching infomercials. I love the way they make every alternative to their product look like back-breaking, slave labour. The housewife sloshing a big bucket of dirty water around on the steam-cleaner-vacuum-thingy commercial, for example. Maybe i should start another thread…
