Standing Blender

When it comes to kitchen appliances blenders are located between juicers and food processors. Juicers are designed to efficiently extract the juice and nutrients from fruits and vegetables. Whereas food processors can do a variety of kitchen tasks from chopping vegetables to making bread dough. The primary purpose of a blender is to liquefy ingredients. They are ideal if you want to emulsify or puree something or crush ice or make a smoothie.

There are two popular types of blenders: the immersion or stick blender, and the standing blender, often referred to simply as "a blender". We will cover the standing blender in this article.

If you're considering the purchase of a standing blender you'll need to consider what you intend to use it for. In modernist cooking, the blender is often used to effectively mix ingredients together when making foams, gels and other dishes. It is also used to create emulsions, liquid gels, and purees. For these uses a relatively inexpensive standing blender will work fine. However, if you would like to use it to crush ice or breakdown raw vegetables for a puree, you'll want to get a blender that has more power. We'll present three recommendations for standing blenders, all in different price ranges and with varying capabilities.

Where to Buy a Standing Blender

Although there are many blenders available for less than $100, I personally would not recommend purchasing one of those. When it comes to blenders, you normally get what you pay for. So the entry blender that we recommend will cost you about $100. It's the KitchenAid 5-Speed Blender. This is a good, relatively low-cost blender made by KitchenAid. It has five speeds, a 0.9 HP motor and a clean touch control pad. It also has that automatic "crush ice" button. The base is diecast and it comes with a shatter resistant pitcher with 56-ounce capacity. The unit is well ranked on Amazon, and shows up on numerous recommendation sites as the preferred low-cost standing blender.

Our recommendation for a mid-priced standing blender is the Breville BBL605XL Hemisphere Control Blender. We believe that Breville is an excellent manufacturer of small kitchen appliances. In addition to this standing blender, we recommend their immersion blender and juicer as well.

This Breville standing blender is designed to handle everything from crushing ice to making smoothies. It has a unique hemisphere bowl/blade system that keeps food from getting stuck under the blade. It has a powerful 750 W high torque motor which can puree just about anything and is quiet to operate. The control pad has an LCD timer and five speed settings plus pulse control. The unit has a heavy duty die-cast metal base and a 48 ounce co-polyester jug. This blender is highly rated and recommended by numerous online review/testing sites. The blender is available at many stores for around $200, about twice the cost of the entry-level blender. But in our opinion - well worth the difference. If you think you may use your standing blender heavily you may want to consider going to the top of the blender line which are the Vitamix products. These are commercial grade products ranging from approximately $450 to more than $750. Moreover, the company stands behind the quality of these units with a seven year warranty. You probably can't go wrong with any of the Vitamix blenders. One of their newest models, the Professional Series 300, is shown in the picture at the top of this page. This cost about $550.00.

If you don't want to totally break the bank, you can get into the Vitamix line at the low-end by purchasing the Vitamix Explorian Blender Low-Profile Container

Even though this is the Vitamix entry-level machine it's a real beast. It has an impressive 2 HP (1380 W) motor that propels the blades up to 240 mph, able to blend the toughest ingredients. Comes with a 64-ounce container perfect for family meals and entertaining. This unit will definitely meet your blending needs for many years in the future. It has excellent ratings on Amazon, and is recommended on many review sites including Consumer Reports (#1).

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This article is by me, Jason Logsdon. I'm an adventurous home cook and professional blogger who loves to try new things, especially when it comes to cooking. I've explored everything from sous vide and whipping siphons to pressure cookers and blow torches; created foams, gels and spheres; made barrel aged cocktails and brewed beer. I have also written 10 cookbooks on modernist cooking and sous vide and I run the AmazingFoodMadeEasy.com website.

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