Read First Before Buy Hamilton Beach 58149 Blender Chopper
It's a versatile blender: I have crushed frozen veggies, fresh broccoli, fresh kale, pineapples, apples, oranges, and bananas in this thing with some juice/milk. The broccoli it tends to take longer to grind down and sometimes gets stuck. Initially, you'll still get the texture of the broccoli florets in your smoothie, but if you put the pitcher in the fridge for a while, the texture dissolves.
I've found usually the trick to make the blender go again with all that wave-action goodness is just to add more liquid so it has more to work with for churning.
Except for the broccoli, this has blended everything very quickly - 30 seconds to a minute. The broccoli takes 5-7 minutes (with checking and adding liquid and sometimes poking things around in the blender).
The blender has four settings, but it feels basically like two: heavy duty for ice/smoothies. More lightly for milkshakes and salsa. (the four settings are basically: pulse heavy duty (you have to hold the button down) , pulse lightly (hold button down), button for heavy duty (you press it and leave it), button for light (you press it and leave it).
For the average joe, the fact that there are two settings is not a problem. My sister has a really fancy high-end blender. It's much much noisier than this one (this one is okay, though I still like to wear earplugs while blending. It's tolerable without earplugs though,e specially when it blends so quickly.) I don't know if she's ever used it on any more than two settings (very light and very heavy duty).
The high-end blender takes a long time to crush thinks like broccoli + ice too, but it does it more finely. That is the only advantage I have found to the high-end blender over this one.
What I like about this one that the high-end blender doesn't satisfy however are:
- really wide container so it's so easy to clean, most things don't even get stuck in the blades
- the glass + pitcher shape are very classy and this blender is really designed for convenience - use the blender, use the container as a serving pitcher. I love just sticking left-over smoothie mix straight into the fridge after picking up the pitcher from the mixing base.
- the cap seals tightly and has a really nice spout for serving and also a flap if you want to stick something in last minute but don't want to lift the whole lid off, or need to poke a chopstick into the mixer to jog some things around.
One of my happiest first kitchen-ware buys!
