The Story of the Melted Food Processor

Check out my review of the Magimix 5200XL.
If you can love an inanimate object, then I love my Magimix food processor. Intensely. It’s a useful, durable, well-designed machine.  As Norene Gilletz wrote in her classic book, The Pleasures of Your Food Processor, the virtue of a quality processor is its ability to stop when it gets overheated.  On lower-quality machines, the motor will burn out when meeting a challenge.

In the past, the processor would slow down and stop when making challah or pasta dough. I would finish the dough by hand, and after the motor cooled off it would work fine. A few months ago, my daughter used the Magimix to make pasta dough. The machine, clearly working hard to get through the sticky dough, started to slow down. But when my daughter turned off the machine, she was unable to remove the “S” blade from the stem of the processor. This kept the bowl stuck in place too. From what we could see of the top of the stem, it looked crumbly on the top and possibly melted. I took it to the store, paid for them to cut off the blade and replace the stem, and ordered a new blade.

I have used several Cuisinart and Magimix food processors over the last 3 decades without any melted parts.

The next time my daughter made pasta dough, she turned off the machine as soon as it started to slow down. We were able to pry off the blade and salvage it. But as you can see from the picture, the top stem had already started to disintegrate.   Admittedly, this stem is not the original and seems to be of a cheaper material. But the original stem had disintegrated even further.

Now I have to decide whether to replace the stem once more and be extra cautious about using the processor for dough, or try to get a higher quality machine. If it exists.

Have you ever had such a problem with your food processor?