The Vitamix

We bought a Vitamix about six months ago.  It was a crazy purchase, sort of like jumping off a culinary financial cliff.  I mean, I have a hard time spending $5 let alone $500 (I will just save you the googling.  That is how much these remarkable machines cost.)  But, with the help of generous folks at our wedding we decided to make the jump.  Everything we read was positive.  They last upwards of 35 years.  They allow you to sneak added nourishment into your meals.  They make quick soup.  You can grind your own kooky flours.  And on and on.

So, we jumped.

Man, what a crazy, awesome device!  We are certainly glad we took the chance and made the investment.

While we always ate smoothies, we eat them even more now.  They also require much less milk and are, as a result, mostly just fruit.  The motor is powerful enough to puree the fruit with very limited liquid.  It also makes it very easy to eat more veg in our smoothies such as spinach, chard, carrots, celery, etc. as its pureed so finely.  We almost always add a carrot these days.

The motor is powerful enough to turn oats into oat flour, rice into rice flour, and, most remarkably in my opinion, dry chickpeas into chickpea flour.  Dry chickpeas are hard!  They just whiz around in the container until they are magically transformed into flour.  I was absolutely amazed the first time I saw it.  I don't often need these sort of "odd ball" flours, but sometimes they do crop up in my health-foodie cookbooks.  Also, many people in my family are gluten free.  Its way handier for me to just grind up as needed rather than have them always on hand.  I almost always have oats, rice, and chickpeas though!

The Vitamix has made Matt's nut cheeses even more like creamy heaven.  I didn't even know it would be possible to improve them, but it was!

It also makes fabulous ice cream-like desserts, like the Three Ingredient Ice Cream.  Its so powerful though that we can play around with the recipe much more--adding ice, fruits, nuts, etc.   It makes excellent blended cocktails, coffees, and milkshakes, too.  It can transform regular sugar into powdered sugar.  We're really pleased about this because we've never really been able to find an affordable bulk or organic option for powdered sugar.  We've always got sugar though.

We can now leave the skins on garlic, kiwi, carrots, eggplant and find no evidence of them in the finished, pureed product.  You can "hide" vegetables in dishes by pureeing them up in this way and slipping them into, say, chili, spaghetti sauce, quiche, etc.  All too often the deal-breaker for Matt or me when trying to broaden our produce palate is textural.  This eliminates that issue.

Because the blades spin so very, very rapidly the Vitamix can also be used to make soup--cooking it and all.

On low settings it can be used to quickly chop whole heads of cabbage and carrots and things which had made stir-fry, eggrolls, etc a snap.  Though, frankly, I still chop with the trusty, old knife and cutting board unless I have a large quantity to cut.

It makes fantastic syrups from fresh fruit and the creamiest Osaka sauce ever.  Well, the creamiest sauces in general, really.  We can tell the pesto we made in the blender versus the pesto made in the Vitamix by sight alone.  There are still visible bits of basil leaf in the former.  In the latter its all uniformly green.

The first time I made my hot sauce in it I processed it too much and it turned out a thin liquid.  Where as in a traditional blender I always struggled to get things creamy and perfectly smooth with this thing I have to use caution in the other direction lest everything end up liquefied!

We use it nearly every day.  We eat more fruits and veg.  That is money well spent by me.