Kitchen Essentials 4: Vitamix
By Nate Cartel
This series is designed to bring new and inexperienced home cooks the best advice on building a kitchen arsenal that will allow you to cook like the pros. There is a tool in professional kitchens that may not seem like an essential at first, but truly is, namely a Vitamix (or comparable product). I don’t recommend purchasing a Vitamix lightly. They are very expensive pieces of equipment, but they are worth every penny.
I have owned a Vitamix for over a year, and it has transformed how me and my wife look at food. It has made our soups smoother, our bisques better, and our smoothies healthier. The Vitamix is so versatile it also rendered our other blended, food processor, and ice-cream maker obsolete. Yes, it can make ice-cream. It can also cook. I didn’t believe that at first either, but it’s true.
There are so many things the Vitamix can do, it’s hard to capture its awesomeness in one review. Like I said above it can make ice-cream! And it can cook food! What other kitchen product can boast those tow extremes? It can make flours, which is a huge benefit for our household because my wife has celiac, so making our own flours from rice and almonds (and anything else we want) significantly cuts down the cost of cooking a gluten-free, mostly paleo diet. It can chop, and puree, and everything in between. It truly is a workhorse in our kitchen, which is a good thing. I tend to be a minimalist in my kitchen philosophy. I dislike all the gadgets and gizmos you can find in any Bed, Bath and Beyond. I want my kitchen tools to be more than one trick ponies, and the Vitamix is anything but a one trick pony.
A Vitamix will run you anywhere from $400 for the base model, to over $1000 for the restaurant grade products, but that isn’t all that much when you do the math. The Vitamix replaced four other kitchen products in our house, maybe five, if you include a stick blender (though we have kept ours, and I think there are good reasons to own a stick blender even if you do own a Vitamix or other stand blender). We were able to get rid of our ice-cream maker, blender, food processor, and mill attachment for our mixer. Each one of these products will cost at least $100 if you want to purchase anything quality, which means the Vitamix really isn’t so costly after all. The quality of the Vitamix also makes it a terrific purchase in the long run.
The amount of smoothies we eat now alone makes up for the cost of the Vitamix, even if every other reason didn’t sway you. Throw in raw kale and strawberries and oranges and anything else your heart can imagine, and the Vitamix makes it a smoothie. No having to strain the drink because not all the food was chopped fine enough, no blown engines, no broken blades. Just pure smoothie awesomeness. Every. Single. Time.
While a Vitamix isn’t exactly an essential in the spirit of the other posts in this series, it is so versatile, well made, and important, I think it needs to be in your kitchen. You will find a whole new level of culinary experience after purchasing one I can’t recommend it strongly enough. It will elevate your soups, gazpachos, salsas, smoothies, flours, ice-creams, and dips that you will find you won’t be able to explain how you ever lived without one.