Can a Vitamix help you in the kitchen?

Over the years, I’ve had many different food processors and blenders, big and small, glass and plastic, but most of them cheapies that haven’t lasted far past their warranties. Sometimes the motors have burnt out or the bit with the motor in it has been OK but I’ve lost the lid or the blades. Who knows how things like that get lost? Thrown out with the peelings?

A lot of very versatile machines have come onto the market and the good ones can range in price from the hundreds into the thousands. We had the opportunity to roadtest the Vitamix (full name Vitamix Total Nutrition Centre), certainly not a cheap machine but nowhere near the most expensive, either. An American family-owned brand, Vitamix has been around for almost 90 years.

The first thing I wanted to try was a food item that’s consumed daily in our multi-generational household. It has only one ingredient, so how good the result is comes down to the processing. Of course, I’m talking about peanut butter, which is nothing but roasted peanuts, though I confess to adding a little sea salt. Following the instructions in the Vitamix recipe book, it took all of one minute to make perfect, smooth-textured, delicately fresh-tasting peanut butter. And, whoa, the power! Now the jar of commercial stuff is languishing in the pantry while everyone prefers the homemade stuff. Even the fussiest child remarked, “This is really good peanut butter.”

Reading through the Vitamix book I was surprised to learn you can make soups and hot chocolate in the Vitamix. The heating happens by friction. The kids and I tested this out by making spiced hot chocolate using organic cocoa powder, organic milk, glucose to sweeten it, a pinch of cinnamon and some organic vanilla essence. We let the machine run for six minutes and, sure enough, we had a jug full of steaming hot chocolate, which we topped with a little whipped cream and grated nutmeg. No need to say how that went down!

To go with the hot chocolate, we made as an after-school snack some mixed-berry frozen yogurt using organic frozen berries (bought at the supermarket), organic plain yoghurt and a tiny dash of stevia for extra sweetness. You need to get the quantities right when making frozen treats; too much yoghurt and it ends up runny. We used the quantities in the book and had berry yoghurt ice-cream in less than a minute.

Later, I tried the prawn laksa recipe, adding some deep-fried tofu cubes to the ingredients list. Instead of using a commercially made spice paste as the base for the laksa, I had my own made from fresh ingredients in a few seconds. Then it was just a matter of slowing the machine to chop a red capsicum, adding coconut milk, fish sauce and sesame oil, pouring it all into a pot on the stove and dropping in the prawns and tofu cubes. Too easy.

Over the week, I used the Vitamix each time the need arose: chermoula for a Moroccan-style tagine, pesto sauce for pasta, and the occasional green smoothie using kale, spinach and parsley straight from the Garden mixed with fruits such as kiwi and banana or other vegies like tomato and carrot.

The versatility of this machine, combined with its sheer power make it one of the best kitchen helpers you could have. More than a blender, it juices, cooks, blends, emulsifies, chops, grates, grinds, kneads and makes frozen desserts. The possibilities are endless: you can make alternative milks, such as rice or almond, in moments; you can grind fresh spices or coffee, as well as wheat, rice or beans to make your own flours — and then turn them into breads (the machine will do the kneading).

This means more certainty about the quality of of your food and drink. That peanut butter, for example, is pure organic peanuts — nothing genetically modified or sprayed with pesticides — and you can make it in quantities that are soon used so it doesn’t sit around with its oils oxidising away. In short, you can have healthier food more economically.