Saturday, November 17, 2012

Best Blender for Use in the Kitchen

If you really want to make delicious drinks like fruit smoothies, then you need to have the best blender you can find for your home.  There are a lot of choices out there.  So how do you narrow down the selection and find the highest quality and best rated blenders?  To help you in your search, we've put together these helpful tips.

Blender Usage
First of all you need to look at how you use blenders.  If you are going to be packing your blending with lots of hard to blend ingredients and making large batches of thick smoothies, then you'll need a large countertop kitchen blender.  These blenders feature large jug containers made of glass, plastic, or polycarbonate.  The motors on these blenders are also powerful, going from a couple hundred watts to over 3 horsepower.  You'll also find the speeds on these blenders will vary from 2 to 15 on some of the high end blenders.  The Blendtec Total Blender is one of the best countertop blenders on the market and it has multiple speed options, a 3 horsepower engine, and 6 preprogrammed blending settings.

For the mobile traveler and those that like small single serving smoothies, then a single serve blender is a good choice.  These blenders, like the Magic Bullet Blender, use small single serve cups that you use to blend your ingredients and then take with you.  You'll even find that these cups fit in you car's cupholder.  Clean up is also a snap as you only need to clean one cup, not a huge blender jar.

If you fix a lot of soups and are very mobile in the kitchen, then an immersion hand blender is the way to go.  The KitchenAid Immersion blender is one of the best you can find and it has 9 speeds and excellent consumer ratings.  Hand blenders are long and thin and can be moved easily around the kitchen and submerged in boiling pots.

Blender Features
After you select the best type of blender based on how you are going to use it, then you can start to look at individual brand features.  Capacity or the amount of ingredients you can fit into the blender container is very important.  You can blend lot of ingredients if you get a large capacity jug like 64 ounces or so.  What the container is made out of is very important as well.  Polycarbonate is one of the best materials, but it also expensive. 

Clean up is also very easy if you get a blender jar that is dishwasher safe.  Selecting the right motor power is another crucial element.  A powerful blender can turn ice to snow, making sure that you won't find any chunky pieces of ice in your tasty smoothie.  You want at least 450 watts in a standard kitchen blender to get the job done.  You can get by with less power on a single serve blender because the container is smaller.

How expensive is the blender you're looking at?  The best blenders tend to be the most expensive, typically around $400 for a Vitamix or Blendtec model.  There are some quality models that you can find for less though, that work very well.  The KitchenAid 5 speed blender, which is a countertop model, is under $100 and has many fantastic features.

Consumer Opinion
The final factor you need to look at is on-line reviews.  You can find these on many sites including GoBlendIt.com and Amazon.com.  Taking the time to read a few reviews can really help you find the best blender.  The information and features on a blender may sound great, but if it breaks down after a short time, then it's a bad buy.  You can find out about product defects, and quality and reliability by reading a few owner reviews before you make your purchase.

As you look through reviews make sure you get both sides of the story by looking at positive and negative reviews.  You want to check out owner reviews from those that have had their blenders for a while and been running them a lot.  Most blender problems like engine failure will happen just a couple of months in.

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