The Ideal Appliance for Your Kitchen
Blenders, more or less in their current form, have existed for almost a century. To be very brief, most often they feature a pitcher-shaped, removable container with fixed blades at the bottom and they are used for mixing fluids and semi-solids. Blenders were initially used in a lot of restaurants, ice cream shops and cafes. Today, they are so widely available that almost every western household owns a blender of some description.
As well as milk shakes of the earlier and more innocent era, the blender has been used over the decades to create cold alcoholic drinks such as pina coladas and daiquiris. In recent years, however, non-alcoholic concoctions such as iced coffee drinks and smoothies have made good use of the appliance.
Blenders are especially good if you are trying to adhere to a special diet that might feature a good deal of shakes or if you want to eke as much nutritional value as possible from a given food source. For example, Vita-mix goes to great lengths to show the consumer how well its machine breaks down tomatoes compared to your teeth. KitchenAid, Cuisinart and Vita-combine are a few players that have made big names for themselves in the blender market over the decades.
The essential functions of today’s domestic food processor include chopping fruit and vegetables, grinding nuts and seeds, kneading tortilla and bread dough, shredding salad, mixing soup and grating cheese.
Without a doubt, those who are doing lots of cooking that is heavy on the fruit and veg and who aren’t too enthused about the chopping duties associated will really benefit from a food processor.
Finally, let us take a look at the machine with the oldest pedigree. Mixers are used for mixing, folding, whipping and beating ingredients. The motorized version of this appliance can either be handheld or attached to a stand, with the stand mixers being the robust of the two. The more elementary manually operated type, which was invented in 1870, is still in use today. Unlike blenders, mixers do not have blades per se (they are more like arms or sturdier whisks and are blunt), function at slower speeds and do not break down larger food items.