Kitchen Blenders
January 28, 2011 | 
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We work on our laptops all day every day, which is a lot of repetitive motion. Now, for you youngsters that are working on the computer, texting, playing on your game consoles, 20 hours each day, it hasn’t hit you yet – but at some stage it will. Once you hit thirty, things start happening…
We like to have smoothies each day, so how best to do that?
We have a lot of kitchen appliances for all sorts of applications; however, when it comes to making drinks, we have several machines that sort of get the job done…
Currently we use a boat motor, i.e. a hand mixer immersion type. It is slow as you have to add each ingredient, mix, then add something else, then mix, and so forth. For a simple drink consisting of water, protein powder, and a little ice cream, it takes about 10 minutes or more with a lot of elbow grease to boot. Times 2 and clean-up takes this to 30 minutes or more.
If we want a more robust drink with fruit or veggies, then this method just won’t cut it.
We have a Back-To-Basics Dual Smoothie Maker and this is good for lite-duty drinks only (i.e. liquids and powder, no whole foods), plus this takes a good while to clean, so we have yet to finish making 2 drinks with clean-up in under 45 minutes. That’s too much and so it has become another dust-collector.
We have a commercial Hamilton Beach Milkshake Maker (3-drink station) and while it is very good for this type of drink, you are limited to milkshakes or whatever you can fit in the 28 oz metal cups that came with it. We have not tried to put in any bulky items (like whole fruit) as you really need some additional hands to achieve that. The clean-up is moderate as we have the unit near the sink so we use the power sprayer to hose it down and wipe/buff it off immediately in order to keep the stainless steel looking good.
Then when we are flat out of time, we will resort to Carnation Instant Breakfast and use the Blender Bottle where we manually shake the drink mix for 5 minutes or more (remove the lid, spoon remaining unmixed powder back into the bottle) at least twice to make sure all of the powder is mixed. Now, this won’t make a brownie 
but it will keep the hunger at bay until you can make a sandwich or a salad or something a bit more substantial later on.
This is relatively fast in terms of clean-up, the capacity of the cup is only 28 oz and it takes a lot of your own personal power to adequately mix all of the powder up. And there is no way you can add whole fresh fruit to a manual shaker and expect it to blend.
So here we are looking, for an appliance that does not require 98% manual labor, a 30-minute disassemble-reassemble-cleaning job, the use of multiple machines to complete the mission, and one that will not stop working after a couple of uses (no abuse, normal use).
We looked into several types of appliances and the cheapies had tons of problems from design flaws, parts falling off, over-heating at the drop of a hat, and extra built-in obsolescence, i.e. the thing quit working with moderate use in under a year (in some cases a few weeks after purchase).
Sadly, when it comes to small appliances, you can expect to routinely spend some egregious amount of time researching to find products that work and won’t blow up just after the warranty period. Today it is all about getting products on shelves as fast as possible with little or no product testing.
We have become the product testers – wow, what a way to save money on quality control – just have the consumers buy and try then deal with issues as they arise. Clearly this is not what I signed up for. But it seems that what it boils down to: buyer beware and plan on spending a lot time in research mode.
So, is there a machine that will happily do everything you ask of it, without breaking within the first week of use?
The good news is, yes, there is, so check out our Blendtec blender review for information about one of the best-performing blenders there is, including our own personal experience with this monster blender.
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