Power Blender Buyer's Guide

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The honest guide to choosing a blender

A good blender is often the most used appliance in the kitchen. Add your ingredients, hit the switch, and you have smoothness from heaven for your soups, smoothies & sauces.

“Blending is the easiest and most efficient way to provide food that is both nourishing and easy to digest. By blending foods, we can counteract the poor eating habits most of us have developed over the years, and that are the cause of many of the physical problems we have.” - Ann Wigmore

Unlike food processors blenders throw foods upward, aerating the ingredients making them fluffy, light and silky. A food processor beats, chops, shreds & slices, but they cannot liquefy, they can't truly blend your drinks, they fail to create that ethereal emulsification that you only witness in shop bought products and restaurant served delights.

Unlike juicing, which separates the liquids in fruit and vegetables from their fibre, blenders use the whole fruit, liquefying it into a fibre rich puree. Because of this you can use a much broader selection of foods with blenders, as well as easily mix in powders, oils, spices and extracts. In fact the options are limitless.

Suffice to say that a blender is a valuable part of your nutrition program. It is an efficient, timesaving asset that will deliver a wide variety of liquid meals and feathery fantasies that your palate will find hard to resist.

Getting a good blender is top priority. Prices span massively, and as with juicers, the models available in the high street are lacking in performance. Although you can pick up attractive blenders from £20, claiming to be a 'power' blender, the fact is that inexpensive blenders have a weak heart. They struggle and strain over every grain and can choke to death on an oversized banana. If all your looking to do is basic mixing and fruit smoothies, then this is fine, but for any grander task - you need real power.

If you don't require mega performance and are looking for style then of course you can have a week hearted appliance of around 500W or less and save yourself a packet! If you demand more then read on...

Some blenders come with a mass of buttons - why? Puree, whip, mix, frappe.... what does it all mean? Well, the professionals don't understand it either - they use the most expensive blenders available with only one switch for high, low and pulse. When they turn their blender on it grabs onto the counter and roars into action. In contrast, the fancy multi-button affairs whine like pencil sharpeners and dance the rhumba right off your counter.

Having said that variable speed controllers are extremely useful. Apart from preventing your smoothie hitting the ceiling they offer a great deal of control - you don't always want to anihilate the contents of your pitcher! Many mixtures benefit hugely from starting slowly and building up to top speed. Even though this can be done quickly there's no comparison between variable speed control and the high/low option.

There was a time with blenders that we'd recommend buying the best you can afford but now things are a bit muddy. The L'Equip RPM is a bargain buy and very attractive but has repeatedly been withdrawn from sale for a variety of reasons. The VitaSmooth has a higher power rating then the VitaMix but despite this the performance very obviously doesn't match the VitaMix.... in fact we think the extra power has gone into extra noise, which is the last thing a 1+HP blender needs (and we're dubious about the blade speed). The newGena was hailed as the answer for a while as it was truly Vitamix performance all round at a better price but sadly the product was forced out of the market by VitaMix (although we do have some stock remaing, see here for details). Finally, the industry standard Vitamix is truly astounding but is now only air-freighted from USA and there are concerns over bisphenol-A in the jug.

Comparison Table

Appliance Name	wattage	pitcher capacity	blade speed (approx)	price (£)	warranty duration	variable speed controller	tamper stick	thermal shutoff
newGena Pro	1500	2	35000	319	5 years	YES	YES	YES
Blendtec Express	1500	1.5	-	399	1 year	NO	NO	NO
VitaMix	850	2	25,000	399	3 years	YES	YES	YES
newGena	1380	2	25000	249	5 years	YES	YES	YES
Vita-Smooth	950	2	30,000?	275	3 years	YES	YES	YES
L'Equip RPM	900	1.75	20000	119	6 years	YES	YES	NO
KitcheAid Ultra Power	500	1.25	10000	109	3 years	NO	NO	NO
Siemens Porsche	450	1.5	-	109	1 year	YES	YES	NO

We do not list Horse Power (HP) as electrical horsepower is used by the electrical industry for electric motors and is defined to be exactly 746 W (at 100% efficiency). This is meaningless to the end user and leads to HP quotes which are rounded up and offer no means of comparison between machines.

You will find that spending around £100 gives you no more than spending £30 in terms of motor power, pitcher capacity and warranty.

The L'Equip RPM unit, although offering good features for not much money, feels much smaller than the 2 litre pitchers, and sadly the attempt to incorporate a tamper stick is barely worth while as it simply doesn't reach as low as one would like. Additionally past machines were discontinued without a product recall due to metal plating flaking off inside the jug.

The startup speed on the Vita Smooth is VERY high, making it frustrating to work with small batches i.e. dressings, as your ingredients immediately hit the lid upon power-up. Seeing as the central design of the machine is a variable speed controller they could really have done with setting the startup speed lower - as it stands it feels like around 50% power. Also, the blade is designed very much as a chopper and not a hammer-mill as in the VitaMix. What this means is that unlike the VitaMix, the ingredients aren't pulled down to the blade for proper fine-blending, but rather spun round and round lots while being chopped. In our tests a smoothie with frozen ingredients took more use of the tamper and about twice as long to process, and there were still small lumps. So despite the similar specification of the pictcher and pusher the Vita Smooth is most definately not a VitaMix. In any case we wouldn't be surprised if VitaMix jump on the VitaSmooth for their cheeky naming!

The Blendtec Xpress has the same powerful motor and stackable jugs as the other commercial blenders in the Blendtec range. You get a 1500W motor and 2x 1.5L pitchers. Seeing as the Blendtec Total Blender seen on YouTube isn't available in the UK this lite commercial machine makes an excellent choice for the domestic power user. There are only 5 programmes plus an 80% power 'Pulse' button - so no variable spead control. Also there's no tamper stick which to experienced Vitamix users makes you think that hard/sticky foods may be difficult to turn over for homogenous processing - but thanks to the hooked blade design you can kneed a dough in less time and more effectively then with the Vitamix and without any extra jug either! The only minor gripe on paper however is the warranty, but truly, machines like this don't break - the warranty is actually 5000 cycles or 1 year, so you should get more then plenty of use out of it - after all it's the same motor as in the top of the range commercial Blendtec. One final nicety of the Blendtec jug is that re-claiming food from the bottom is far easier than with the Vitamix pitcher as the blendtec jug is wider with a 2-point blade versus the 4-point vitamix blade at the bottom of an all together deeper and narrower jug.

Most Power Blending enthusiasts however will want VitaMix performance and the food-prep functionality that the VitaMix offers. So if you desire the VitaMix, or just fancy all those American cookbooks you get with it, then your minimum spend becomes £399, plus an extra £99 if you choose the additional dry jug. The Vitamix has a few gripes, namely an awkward lid and awkwardly deep jug. These flaws only come to light if you use the Blendtec which shows off as easier to use and you'll loose far less dinner to the bottom of the Blendtec pitcher.

The newGena is a Vitamix in Vitamix clothing. Apart from the label being different not much else is and in fact the parts of the two machines are entirely cross compatible. There's not many left though - scoop one up here.

If you prefer to know that you can blend golf balls, garden rakes, iPods and more - then the Blendtex Xpress could be the answer to your prayers.

Spring/Summer 2008 will see the introduction of the newGena Pro. An update to the expelled newGena we are awaiting its arrival with baited breath for it's increased power and fully loaded specification, including a noise reduction cover. If you've ever watched VitaMix make soup at an exhibition (where they leave the blender running for 5 minutes or so) you may recall that they place the blender in a polycarbonate 'space helmet' so you don't go deaf while they flog you the hardware. But surprisingly they don't try and sell you the noise reduction parts - so when you get home you find that making soup disappoints the neighbours. The newGena Pro will finally change that, and in case you like annoying your neighbours the cover is removable.