London’s on a blender: the capital’s most wanted kitchen gadgets

Are you dreaming of a supercharged food mixer that can chop, heat and power you to healthy living in seconds? Us too — so in the spirit of sharing, four Standard writers gave the capital’s most wanted kitchen gadgets a spin
Extract the goodness (of gin): Richard Godwin found the NutriBullet is great for whizzing up cocktails (Picture: Daniel Hambury)
Daniel Hambury

The NutriBullet

According to its manufacturers, Homeland Housewares of Los Angeles (of course), the NutriBullet is no mere blender. It’s the world’s first Nutrition Extractor! Exclamation mark and all! “We are thrilled you have chosen the path to health and vitality!” proclaims the manual, which rails against the Western diet and doubles as instructions for you too. After all, you need to know what to do with the lease of life your NutriBullet is about to give you. The NutriBullet offers the orthorexic consumer what you might call the three cons: consumption, convenience and control.

Consumption, in that you need to eat sometimes and the NutriBullet makes that much easier. You can use it for ordinary blending purposes (soup, baby food, margaritas), but its USP is that it can turn hitherto solid substances into liquid (kale, carrots, almonds).

Convenience, in that it is surprisingly easy to use. For the trademark NutriBlast, which forms the cornerstone of the six-week transformation plan prescribed by the manual, you fill the cup with the recommended 50 per cent leafy greens, 50 per cent fruit, a sprinkle of nuts or seeds and a dash of water. Then you screw on the detachable sextuple blade, turn it downside up and slot it into the base. WHIRR! Feel the power! After a few seconds you have a liquid lunch — convenience food more convenient even than McDonald’s.

Control, in that, if you believe the claims of the manual, only with this piece of equipment will you be able to reverse the ageing process, unlock the “gold mine” of zinc inside watermelon seeds and reach the “cancer-blocking compounds” inside broccoli that you would miss by chewing alone. Stupid chewing. A handful of flax seeds blended in the NutriBullet, the manual maintains, is equivalent to 60 cups of chewed broccoli.

If you subsist mainly on processed crap, you could do a lot worse than sub in a few NutriBlasted meals, but do please take the cancer stuff with a pinch of salt. (Not literally: salt causes water-retention which can leave you looking puffy and bloated!) And do not overlook its potential for gin.

The history of blended cocktails is more venerable than you might think. It was Constantino Ribalaigua Vert of La Florida bar in Havana who first introduced the Waring blender in the Thirties and earned fame for the sherbet-like consistent of his daiquiris. The ones that Hemingway put away there would have been frozen. The robust blade of the NutriBullet is up to all manner of piña coladas and zombies, I don’t doubt.

Moreover, alcohol has a rich history of healthfulness. Chartreuse, a concoction of rare Alpine herbs, was invented by Carthusian monks in the 16th century as an “elixir for long life”. Kamm & Sons is a bitter liqueur compounded from 55 beneficial botanicals, including ginseng, by the contemporary genius Alex Kammerling. Even good old gin has plenty of good properties — juniper was long thought to benefit the kidneys. Flax has nothing on that lot.

So, I added a bit of celery and kale by way of leafy stuff, half an avocado and half a proper pear by way of fruit, some almonds, and lemon, mint and agave syrup for flavour. I then topped it up with the liqueurs, gin and a dash of water. WHIRR! A NutriBlast Special.

Everyone in my house at that point was sceptical. You know what? It wasn’t half bad. Some 24 hours on and I still haven’t been diagnosed with cancer.

£99 from Argos, argos.co.uk

Richard Godwin

The Boss

Whatever the result, my blender — The Boss — definitely wins on name. This thing wants to rewrite the rules of your kitchen, to implement its new regime in your house. The name suggests it will make the oven flame with rage at its new redundancy and get your poor inadequate Kenwood hand-blender in a spin over its inadequacy to do the job.

Heston Blumenthal has lent his face to this £499 product by Sage appliances, which may sway some to believe in the value of its claims that its “50 per cent smaller particles” give you a whole new texture. The suggestion is that you will knead bread in it, make your own flour, blend your own nut butter.

Top notch: The Boss

The Boss has a heating function too and as I just wanted a quick work-night dinner, I opted for soup. I threw in some peas, spring onions, stock and spices and hit the “Soup” button (easy stuff) — and then jumped nearly clean through the ceiling to involuntarily visit my neighbours as the noise filled the flat. Wow, is it a conversation killer.

But roughly five minutes later dinner was served. They are right about the different texture but I’m not quite sure I like it. It’s positively foamy. Still, chuck stuff in, hit a button, forget about it (sort of, if you cover your ears) and you have instant food. No, the oven isn’t yet redundant but The Boss does deserve a spot on the work surface.

The Boss from Sage by Heston Blumenthal, £499, sageappliances.co.uk

Jasmine Gardner

Vitamix

Of course I didn’t read the instructions. I mean, nobody actually reads the instructions when they get a new gadget, do they? They wing it. Experiment. Then whinge bitterly that it doesn’t work properly, that they’ve spent all this cash on a sparkly new toy only for it to be as much use as a condom in a convent.

Except the Vitamix is actually pretty well designed for winging it; as kitchen henchman go, it’s of the loyal and forgiving sort. And despite being a favourite machine of human fun-vacuums Miranda Kerr and Gwyneth Paltrow, it’s a laugh to use — especially if you make a few, excessively rummed strawberry daiquiris in it before attempting anything more ambitious.

Fun gadget: Vitamix

Next, I made tortilla soup: the blades rotate so fast that the friction heats the soup. Ingredient selection was a problem, Sainsbury’s being short on yellow squash. I’m not sure that explains why our soup looked nothing like the picture, though, coming out a colour that my doctor friend and dinner guest described as “like C-diff”. I think he meant a patient’s effluent, which didn’t exactly make me want to eat it. He’d also gone so OTT on the jalapeño that the soup was so spicy, I regretted it twice. It was also oddly frothy.

Nonetheless, I loved the Vitamix. It makes cooking fun. Unfortunately, by not reading the instructions, we missed the best feature: it self-cleans in 60 seconds.

Vitamix. from £399 to £650, vitamix.co.uk

Rosamund Urwin

Thermomix

Acquiring a Thermomix is akin to joining a cult. It makes big promises, and for £900 it should. One of its taglines is “the world’s smallest, smartest kitchen”. As well as blending, this sleek dream machine heats up, chops, weighs and provides recipes on a smart screen, boasting that it is 12 appliances in one. I wouldn’t be surprised if it could do my laundry too.

You can’t just buy one but have to be given a demonstration. Devout Thermomixer Sindy Caplan comes to show me everything the TM5 model does, telling me it changed her life and has a keen following among chefs.

Dream machine: Thermomix

Its USP is that you can control the temperature - handy if you believe that certain foods are only good for you when heated to a specific degree. For health fiends there is a steaming basket called The Varoma, which sounds like a machine from Back to the Future.

Caplan and I make a green juice that, considering it was to be pulverised by a fast-spinning blade, required a surprising amount of pre-chopping. A healthy strawberry sorbet, however, took just five minutes. Washing up is easy — put in water and whizz.

When I am unleashed on my own with it at home I make a soup, which has a strange foamy texture, then pizza dough - it kneads remarkably efficiently. So, though it is antisocially noisy and makes an annoying smug chirp when everything is done, having a extra cooking device is useful — especially in my tiny kitchen, where my flatmates and I often squabble over chopping boards and hob space.

Thermomix, £900, thermomix.vorwerk.co.uk

Susannah Butter

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