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Kitchenware News September 2014

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Product Review PRODUCT REVIEW www.kitchenwarenews.com ■ SEPTEMBER 2014 ■ KITCHENWARE NEWS & HOUSEWARES REVIEW 9 BY LORRIE BAUMANN The Blendtec Designer 625 with Wildside+ Jar comes with a motor base and 3-quart BPA-free square jar, a Blending 101 quick- start guide and recipes – and a retail price tag that's not far under $500. Before you ask a customer, or me, to hand over that much money for a kitchen small electric, you'd be well advised to have some solid answers to serious questions about just why it is that this appliance is worth that kind of money. That s why Blendtec sent it to me to try it and report my experience to you. When they told me they were going to do this, my first thought was that I'd try it with a few smoothies, and it would work just fine, and I'd write something casual about the experience, and it would all be good. And so I took the blender home from my office and unpacked it in my dining room and proceeded to work my way through a few of the recipes in the recipe guide, including the smoothie recipes. They were easy and delicious, and it was all good, and I started thinking about what I'd write about that. And that's when it hit me: there are a lot of other blenders out there on the market that are priced at much less than this machine. There are even a few that are priced at much more – some made by Blendtec, even. I'm pretty confident that many of those other, cheaper blenders will also make an adequate smoothie or even a butternut squash puree or a batch of cherry-berry frozen yogurt. So what makes this blender worth its price tag? I thought about that for a while, and this is what I came up with: before I'd pay that price for a kitchen appliance, it would really have to convince me that it was really going to change my life for the better. To be fair to Blendtec, this is a point of view that somebody there seems to have thought about also, because printed on the side of one of the boxes I'd unpacked to get at the blender were these words: "Congratulations. You're about to look, feel and live better." So yeah, they get it. But the real question here is this: Can the blender live up to those words? I spent another couple of weeks putting this blender through its paces before I came up with an answer while I was liquefying a container of raspberries to strain and pour into a batch of panna cotta. And the answer was that there are several elements that go into putting a good meal on the table. Good ingredients are important, of course, and I discovered in the process of shopping for smoothie ingredients that grocers are well- prepared for smoothie shoppers with freezer cases full of pre-mixed bags so that I didn't even need a recipe. There are even Jamba- branded frozen fruit mixtures to replicate the smoothies I might buy in the shop, if there happened to be a Jamba Juice in my Blendtec Designer 625: Lovely Lines and Horsepower to Spare kitchen. Smoothies not having been part of my life before, except in a very peripheral way when my daughter was a teenager, I had really had no idea. So ingredients, yes. But technique and tools are also critical. Technique is what professional chefs go to culinary school to learn, and every kitchenware retailer will tell you that the right tools will make all the difference to the quality of your experience in the kitchen. That brings me back to my panna cotta in progress, which I was making as the capstone dessert for a romantic dinner for two, while I thought about something that Natasha Amott, the owner of Whisk in New York City, had said to me when I interviewed her to write about her store. She said that there's something special about making dessert for someone you love, and it occurred to me then that she's right about that. That's when it struck me how much I was counting on that Blendtec blender to deliver that dessert for me, and that over the previous month, it had simply taught me that I could. It had made me smoothies; it had beaten me up some batter for a lemon bread; it had made me a couple of batches of f rozen yogurt; it had made me a hot butternut squash soup; and it had ground up a couple of carrots for a two-minute carrot cake. If I put some ingredients in that jar and pressed down on the touchscreen, the Blendtec delivered me something good to eat. So when I'd thought about making a raspberry-chocolate panna cotta, I hadn't worried at all about the possibility of a blender-created failure. So that's what I have to say about that. For the rest, you can read most of it at blendtec.com, should you choose to do so. The company has taken a remarkably transparent approach to posting product reviews from consumers on its website. The Designer 625 has a great user interface in the form of a lighted touch screen that doesn't collect food residue or germs and is very easy to clean. It's sleek and beautiful, and it fits perfectly under my kitchen cabinets. It has preprogrammed cycles that turn the most usual things I might do with it into one-touch operations. It is noisy, though – if you've ever stood in the lobby of a juice shop and listened to the blenders roar as they pulverize smoothie ingredients, you'll already have the right idea. This machine has a 1625-watt motor and its blunt blade will grind up raw carrots without any apparent difficulty at all – it would be unfair to expect that to happen without a little machine noise. It has also given every indication that it'll just continue grinding out smoothies for a good long time to come – there's an eight- year warranty on the motor base and jar. It's easy to clean, and easy to use. But has it changed my life for the better? Well, I got that answer the morning after I returned from a 10-day visit to Iowa for a vacation that I'd combined with visits to kitchen stores in Davenport and Des Moines, where I met Kathleen Collins and Teresa Adams-Tomka. The last leg of my flight had been delayed by weather, so I'd arrived home, dumped my suitcases in my living room and headed straight for bed. The next morning, I was due back in my office even though I was inhabiting a body that still hadn't recovered from the flight. I stumbled into my kitchen and brewed up a cup of tea on autopilot, and then I opened the ref rigerator to rummage around for something to eat. I came up with a rock- solid banana that I'd tossed into the freezer before I left rather than let it rot on the counter, a bag of frozen peach slices and a few withered strawberries. Smoothie!

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