4 Best Blender To Buy
The Best Smoothie Makers Whatever Your Budget
1. Breville Blend Active Personal review: The best budget blender
You'll get impressive results from this great-value £20 smoothie maker
There’s something rather pleasing about the way the Breville Blend Active Personal looks. Smoothie makers are marketed towards healthy, active people, and the Blend Active Personal has this look down pat. Its white, grey and blue finish (green, pink and orange are also available) reminds me of a running shoe, and the two supplied cups have slender waists and finger indentations, presumably so you can keep a grip on them while slurping down kale during your morning run.
What's in the box?
It all looks and feels well made – amazing considering the Blend Active Personal is just £20. The smoothie maker comes with a compact base, which isn’t much larger than a bag of sugar so shouldn’t take up much space in your kitchen cupboard, two tough-feeling plastic bottles and two lids and a blending blade.
The instruction manual is short and to the point – no full-colour photographs of beautiful smoothies, but that would be a bit much to expect on a machine this cheap. There is at least room for a selection of shake and smoothie recipes.
Ease of use
The smoothie maker is easy to use. Just fill up the maximum fill line (which is easier to see than on many other smoothie makers I’ve tested), screw on the blade attachment, turn the whole assembly upside down and use the blender’s bayonet fitting to attach it to the base. You then just need to hold down the Blend button until your smoothie is smooth.
Blending performance
My first test was a mixture of kale (around half the blending cup) about 120g of mixed berries and a whole sliced banana. I then topped the cup up to the maximum 600ml mark with water. The manual warns that you shouldn’t use the motor continuously for more than 30 seconds, and after this time I had a fairly smooth drink. The blades hadn’t quite dealt with the tricky kale leaves to the degree I’d hoped, and some of the larger bits stuck to my teeth. Things were better after another 30 seconds of blending; the result wasn’t as smooth as that produced by the all-conquering Sage the Boss to Go, but it was certainly pleasant enough.
I had a similar result from my second smoothie, which consisted of a chopped apple, an orange split into eight segments and a sliced banana, along with four ice cubes and topped up to the maximum fill line with orange juice. It was here that I noticed one drawback of the slim-waisted cups: there's less room for big chunks of fruit, so I had to chop my apple into more pieces that my customary eight. After 30 seconds of blending I had a smoothie with quite a chunky consistency, but one that was still pleasant to drink. Another 10 seconds of blending reduced the size of the chunks of apple peel to make a really rather lovely fruit smoothie.
Verdict
The Breville Blend Active Personal is an excellent smoothie maker at a very low price. It produced a top-drawer fruit smoothie and one of the better kale smoothies I’ve seen. It’s not up there with the Sage the Boss to Go smoothie maker, but it’s over £100 cheaper. It’s a bargain and a Best Buy.
Click Here To Learn More About Breville VBL136 Blend Active Personal Blender, 300 W - Blue
2. Sage by Heston Blumenthal the Boss To Go review: The boss of blending
It's one of the most expensive smoothie makers you'll find – but it's also the best
The Boss to Go is the most expensive smoothie maker I’ve seen, but its design goes a long way to justifying its high price. Its brushed metal base and discrete branding make it a stunning smoothie maker. It’s a good job it looks good, as it’s also the heaviest model I’ve tested, so you won’t want to hide it away and have to lift it out of a cupboard every morning.
What's in the box?
Open it up and you'll find the powerful 1,000W motor assembly, and two 800ml bottles with sipping caps and more compact storage caps for when you want to store your smoothie in the fridge for a while. There’s an instruction book and, which is a bit of a treat, a slickly produced full-colour recipe book, complete with detailed descriptions of why smoothies are the key to a long and healthy life.
The feeling of quality extends to the blending cups. They’re made of thick plastic and feel tough, and are roughly pint-glass shaped; this means they don’t look as stylish as the slim bottles shipped with blenders such as the Salter Blender to Go and Breville Blend Active Personal, but the cups’ wide bodies make it easier to fit in your ingredients and make the cups easier to wash up. You can also wash the cups, lids and blade assembly in the dishwasher.
Ease of use
The sipping lids fit with a pleasing bayonet action, and have a plastic loop – presumably so you can hang the cup from your rucksack or pram handle. The reassuringly heavy blade assembly fits into the bottom of the blending cups with the same bayonet action – it’s all very easy and satisfying to use.
Once you’ve added your ingredients, to start blending you just need to place the cup and blade assembly on the base and twist a few degrees anti-clockwise. There is a claimed ‘pulse’ function, but this just involves rotating the cup back and forth to engage and disengage the motor.
Blending performance
The manual warns that you shouldn’t blend for more than 10 seconds at a time, which made me wonder whether I’d have to blend my smoothies in stages. I needn’t have worried. The Boss to Go made short work of my first recipe, which consisted of half a cup of kale, half a cup of mixed berries and a sliced banana, topped up to the cups’ maximum fill line with water. The blades got the tricky kale leaves down to a nice small size, making for a pleasant smoothie with no large leaves to stick to your teeth. Despite its powerful 1,000W motor the smoothie maker isn’t too noisy, either.
I was equally impressed with my sweet smoothie. This consisted of an apple cut into eight pieces with the skin left on, an orange cut into eight segments, a sliced banana and four ice cubes, topped up to the cup’s maximum fill line with orange juice. After a 10-second blend I was left with a beautiful smoothie.
It’s important to leave the skin on the apple to make sure you’re getting all the health benefits, but this can trip up some smoothie makers, leaving an unpleasant bitty texture. Not so the Boss to Go. It dealt well with all the fruit, leaving a smoothie that was just bitty enough for my taste.
Verdict
The Boss to Go may be expensive, but it looks good, feels well made and produces the best smoothies I’ve seen. If you want the best possible blended fruit and veg drinks, this is the machine to buy.
Read More About Sage by Heston Blumenthal The Boss To Go Blender, 0.5 L, 1000 W Find Here.
3. Salter NutriPro 1000 review: A top choice for smoothies
Not the ultimate smoothie maker, but a powerful machine that's currently available at a very good price
The Salter NutriPro 1000 is a powerful blender. You can tell this from its name, which invokes the blending motor's 1,000W output, and the fact there's a '1,000 Watts' label embossed in silver on the bottom of the unit. The instruction manual also has a "Super Charged 25,000 RPM 1000W Power" label.
This is not a blender that messes about, then, but it's also surprisingly inexpensive. The NutriPro 1000 seems to have undergone a massive price cut, down from £150 to around £80, so has the potential to be a bargain.
It's a very big blender, with a base around the size of a (large) table lamp, so it won't be for you if space is tight in your kitchen cupboards. It's heavy, too, but I was disappointed that the base is made of plastic rather than the metal of the Best Buy-winning Sage The Boss to Go smoothie maker. The manual isn't up there with Sage's desktop publishing masterpiece, but it's still chock-full of recipes.
The NutriPro 1000 comes with three cups: a tall, fat 1l model and two shorter, but just as fat, 800ml cups. They're all made of thick plastic and feel tough, but aren't made for small hands. I'm not keen on the lugs sticking out the sides, either, which are needed to lock the cup into the blender base: it's unpleasant to catch your finger on them when screwing on the supplied sipping lids or storage caps.
Once you’ve filled one of the goblets with your ingredients, you just need to screw on the blending blades, invert your cup and fit it to the base with a bayonet action. This will immediately start the blending process, at which point you are made immediately aware of the motor's power. This smoothie maker is loud.
It was also effective. My first smoothie recipe consisted of half a cup of kale, half a cup (about 120g) of mixed berries and a banana. I also topped the mixture up with water to the maximum fill line. At first I tried this with the 800ml cups, but I had trouble fitting the ingredients in. This is surprising considering I had no problem with other smoothie makers' 600ml cups, but it could be to do with the cups' squat shape.
I had no problem fitting everything into the 1l bottle. It took around a minute of blending to really deal with the kale leaves properly, but once I'd shaken the motor's roar from my head I had a very nice smoothie. There were some kale bits remaining, but nothing too big.
The second recipe, of apple, orange, banana, ice cubes and orange juice, produced a lovely drink. The NutriPro dealt very well with the apple skin, to produce a smoothie with just the right texture.
Verdict
The Salter NutriPro 1000 loses out to the other big, powerful smoothie maker I’ve tested – Sage's The Boss to Go – in terms of design and the ultimate quality of smoothies it can produce. However, at its current low price I'm prepared to overlook many of its niggles. It's still not quite worth three times the price of the Breville Blend Active Personal, and Sage's smoothie maker remains my favourite overall, but it's still an impressive machine at its current price and wins a Recommended award.
Click Here To Know More About Salter Silver 1000 Watt NutriPro Blender And Accessory Pack.
4. Philips Daily Collection Mini Blender review: More than a smoothie maker
Philips has created a versatile mini blender that handles a wide range of foods, but it doesn’t make the greatest smoothies
Pros
Handles more than just fruit
Doesn't take up much room
Cons
Smoothies aren't particularly smooth
Creates more washing-up than others
The Philips Daily Collection Mini Blender is one versatile machine. In addition to mixing up smoothies and assorted other blending tasks, you get an easy-carry bottle to take your smoothie with you, and a mini-blender for grinding up ingredients such as nuts, coffee beans and peppercorns, or even vegetables and meat.
Features and design
The Mini Blender’s design strikes a fine balance between the brightly coloured flashiness of the Breville Blend Active Personal and the functional dowdiness of the Morphy Richards Blend Express. Its chrome and black finish wouldn’t look out of place in a kitchen chock-full of expensive appliances, and it feels tough, too: the firm clunk as you clip the goblet into the blender’s base is reassuring.
This isn’t technically a smoothie maker, but Philips evidently has that in mind, as the machine comes with a dedicated 600ml cup with a sipping lid for your concoctions. There aren’t any recipes in the instruction manual, though, which is one of those annoying types that folds out like a map and tries to explain basic things with bafflingly obtuse drawings.
Unlike dedicated single-serving smoothie makers, where you blend your ingredients directly in the drinking cup, with the Philips model you have to do your blending in the goblet before pouring the smoothie into the supplied takeaway cup. The advantage is that the goblet’s width means there’s much more room for your ingredients, but the disadvantage is that there’s twice as much washing-up to do.
Does it make great smoothies?
Our smoothie tests are designed to see how well a machine can chop up tricky but healthy ingredients, such as kale or apple peel, and make them palatable in a smoothie. For the first test of the unit’s blending capabilities, we filled half the goblet with kale, put in one chopped banana and around 120g of mixed berries, then topped up to the 600ml mark with water.
After blending, the Philips presented a reasonable kale smoothie. There were still some chunks of kale leaf – it certainly wasn’t up there with the best kale smoothies – but it was still perfectly pleasant. The second smoothie test was less successful. This contains a cored apple cut into eight pieces with the skin left on, an orange split into eight segments and a sliced banana, along with four ice cubes and topped up with orange juice to the 600ml mark.
This smoothie was far too chunky, and after a 30-second blend there were still some stringy bits of apple skin in there, which rather spoiled things. Even after another 30 seconds of blending the smoothie was still rather too bitty. Clearly, if you want good results from the Philips, you’ll need to take care about how finely you chop your ingredients to begin with.
Verdict
It’s not the best smoothie maker, but the Philips Daily Collection Mini Blender is a versatile machine at a good price. If you’re after a mini-blender to use for multiple tasks and the odd smoothie, it’s not a bad buy, but if smoothies are a priority then you're better off with the cheaper Breville Blend Active Personal.
Learn More About Philips HR2876/01 Daily Collection Mini Blender with Mini Chopper, 0.6 L, 350 W - Oyster Metallic Find Here.
