Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Our blender seems to be on it's last leg and I am, for the first time, considering a VitaMix. I'm just trying to figure out what benefits I will get for paying about 7x more than I will for a simple blender. Enlighten me, please!

Well Cookie....I love mine. It of course makes great smoothies, but you also get recipes to make hot soups and icy deserts. It also makes quick work of grating cheese or making peanut butter. You can do almost anything you can do with a processor and a blender....grinding grains and chopping meat are also easy. It is so much more powerful than traditional blender and will last forever.
I am so glad I bought one.

What Ilene said. I couldn't live without mine.

Amy

Yup, I'm a total convert. In lots of things it isn't so much that it does something others can't, it just does it so much better. Whiz a soup and it is unbelievably velvety and smooth, for example.

There is nothing like a VM for Mexican sausces, either. I was amazed when I first got mine, and made one of the sauces in which the toasted and soaked chiles are ground up, then pressed through a strainer, to remove the bits of skin, and the seeds. There was nothing left in the strainer - it all went through, it was ground up so fine! Tomato seeds also grind up like this, making the smoothest gazpacho in existence, w/o straining it, and the olive oil emulsifies incredibly well, not separating at all, like with my older blenders. And I just made some hummus from scratch (well, almost, since I used a can of beans ), grinding up the sesame seeds and oil to a velvety tahini, before adding the rest of the ingredients.

Quite a few converts here, I see!

So, I've never used a VM, and I have some questions. I like my Cuisinart and use it a lot. So do I need something else for those things, like grating cheese, etc? Also, for soups and sauces...I tend to like texture in my soups and sauces; veggies in chunks rather than totally smooth. Same with my salsas, marinaras, etc Does everything come beaten smooth in a VM, or can you control it. Or do you want to?

A VM definitely only blends; it won't replace a food processor, assuming (as you say) the food processor is used for things like grating.

Most VM's come (and, I think, all new consumer models) with constant variable speed (which helps greatly to avoid splattering most of the, for example, pesto on the lid...) and allows full control. However, if you like some chunk, I've found an immersion (hand) blender to be great as it is less work and allows pretty good control.

With the VM you can achieve both silky and chunky in the same product. Sometimes when I'm looking for that contrast of textures I'll whizz a quarter or half of my product in the VM until very smooth. I'll then take it out of the VM and add the rest of the product diced. The quality of that product is closer to what you find in many restaurant preparations (and this technique is used a lot in restaurants) than you could ever achieve with an FP. That being said, as Paul pointed out, by using the constant variable control of the VM you can get chunk by using lower speeds.

Immersion blenders are very useful as well, and give you great results, but different than what I described above.

It's probably a little hard to wrap your head around the subtleties of the differences between these appliances unless you've used them all to experiment.

I've never met anyone who regretted purchasing a VM.

Amy

Ditto to all of the above plus tagging on to Amy's comment re: regrets - if you do regret it you can eBay it quickly and at a great price.

Good point!

Doh, even though I've done that many times, I never remember it until I need to do it (and sometimes not then). Lack of experience in planning technique, as opposed to just doing it, which is definitely one of those things which separates the pro from amateur hackers like me.