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Testing blenders isn’t just about making smoothies and crushing ice. There are plenty of other recipes that blenders work well with and these tests highlight how capable each model is when it comes to dry, bulky and coarse ingredients.
Ice
In a test of pure crushing power, we placed two cups of ice cubes in each blender. Calculating the number of pulses needed to achieve fine crushed ice gives a good indication of real-world cutting force. The three blenders we recommended above performed well.
smoothie
A classic blender recipe, smoothies were at the top of my list of recipes to test. This shouldn’t be a big test for any decent blender, so it’s all about speed and consistency. We used 2 cups of orange juice and 1 cup of frozen strawberries to make our test smoothies.
While many of these tests produced very similar results, some worked faster than others. Not all blenders come with presets, but those that do almost always have a juicing function. When possible, this is the mode we used. If there is no smoothie blender function, we followed the manual blender recommendation to make smoothies. This was usually about a minute at the top.
The juice test starts with frozen whole strawberries and orange juice.
This is a relatively easy test and most blenders handle frozen ingredients well. Some were more frothy and some were smoother, but only the Black & Decker model left large chunks of frozen strawberries unblended.
Nut flour and butter
Blenders aren’t all about drinks. There are plenty of other uses, including grinding dry ingredients. To test dry ingredients, place a cup of almond slivers (unroasted) in each blender and process until they turn into a fine flour. This presents quite a challenge for some blenders, but most were able to do it in about 10 to 20 pulses, with the Hamilton Beach model achieving noticeably coarser results.
Nut butter is a different story. Most blenders aren’t really designed for the long run times and level of processing needed to make butter like almond butter or peanut butter. In fact, many recommend not running the blender for more than a few minutes at a time.
This nut flour is a bit coarse.
Only one Vitamix model showed real signs of progress toward almond butter in our nut flour testing, and it settled before achieving a good consistency. Most models simply slide the dry ingredients up and into the hard-to-wash crevices of their lids. If you’re ready to make nut butter, we recommend a model like the Oster with the included processing set, or a separate food processor.
cheese
Did you know that blenders can shred cheese? This is correct; Some blenders can. We put an 8-ounce block of cheese into each blender and blended until the entire block was shredded. This has highlighted some interesting design choices between some of the models. The Ninja, for example, lost the cheese round because the blender’s multiple blade levels made it impossible to put a block of cheese in the blender. I had to cut it into pieces.
Blenders can shred cheese and the NutriBullet did it in record time; Only four beats.
Both models of the Vitamix had some problems in this particular test, as they poked holes in the block of cheese without actually mixing it, simultaneously causing the little cheese that had been shredded to melt as the machine heated up. Meanwhile, the NutriBullet, Ninja, Instant Pot, Breville Super Q, and Hurom Hexa grated a block of cheese in less than five pulses.
Pie dough
If you’ve seen our List of the best waffle makersIt should come as no surprise that pancake batter showed up in our blender test. While I was happy to turn on the griddle and flip some cakes, mixing the batter is an important test. It measures how easily or difficult the blender mixes wet and dry ingredients.
