Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Mother of All Blenders

I've been making my own soymilk for a while now, but the filter in my SoyaJoy finally wore out. I started making soymilk with my blender, and discovered that it was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Until the magic smoke started coming out of the blender. It seems that grinding soybeans is very hard on a blender.

I'd wanted one for years, and now I had the perfect excuse. It Was Time.

I got the vitamix blender.

Imagine, if you will, a blender with settings from 1 to 10, and High. You then notice that 3 is labelled "liquidate". It's like in spinal tap where the amp can go up to 11, but in this case, it's more like 30.

The nice thing about this machine is that it can turn a vegetable into a juice (albeit a thick one) easily. It obliterates anything you put in there. The advantage is that you end up eating the whole fruit, skin, seeds, fiber, and all. Much better for you.

Other tricks it can do: ice and strawberries become icecream if you leave it in there for about 60 seconds. A blend left in there for 4-5 minutes will become soup, the friction heats it to boiling. It also can grind wheat berries into flour.

I've eaten more vegetables today than I usually do in a week. I had two carrot juices (one with a tomato and some ginger, one with some lemon); a soymilk and strawberry smoothy, a bowl of soup (carrots, tomato, potato, celery, etc.) which was very filling, and I made some lemonade. Of course, I also got to make my soymilk, which was the stated purpose of getting this in the first place.

I've been wanting to go more "whole food" for a while, this sure makes it easier.

4 comments:

John said...

I knew someone who lost 40 pounds on a diet where all he did was juice his food. He even had a steak shake (which sounds kinda gross to me) evry now & then.

jfklein said...

Now I can come visit you and have that 2x4 smoothie. Does your new blender come with any routing bits?

Unknown said...

My current Panasonic doesn't seems to able to do that. What the brand make of your blender? How much does it cost? I like to get one too.

Mattox Beckman said...

The brand is called Vitamix, and you can get them online from www.vitamix.com. They are a bit pricey... a basic model will cost about $350.