A great blender makes puréeing, blending, and juicing easy. Whether you love to make icy drinks, ice cream, veggie juices, or hot soup, there are some things that you need a great blender for if you want to make them at home. There’s no workaround or secret hack to skirt your way around things when it comes to a blender; if it can’t blend smoothly, it just won’t.
Blendtec’s Total Blender is a classic appliance with a long history of delivering excellent results. Keep reading to find out how it keeps up with the crowd.
What’s in the box of the Blendtec Total Blender?
The Blendtec Total Blender is a 2.6L, 1500-Watts blender that’s available exclusively at Best Buy in Canada. It comes with the blender’s base, a 2.6L Wildside+ jar, a manual, and warranty information. (The manual and jar insert come with a few recipes if you’re looking for inspiration to get started with your blender.)
What are the Blendtec Total Blender’s features?
Blendtec’s Total Blender is made to be a workhouse in your home kitchen. It’s a commercial-grade blender (that’s only approved for household use) with a 3.0 peak horsepower motor, 10 manual speeds, 6 preprogrammed settings, and a pulse button. It has one double-sided stainless steel blade in a BPA-free copolyester “Wildside+” jar.
The Total Blender is designed with a push-button touchpad and an illuminated LCD display. When using its preset functions, the LCD display will count down the remaining seconds left on the preset.
What can you do with the Total Blender?
This blender is great for a wide variety of different kitchen tasks. You can use it to blend smoothies, crush ice, purée, and more. On top of “regular” blender tasks, it’s also designed to make dough, non-dairy milks, nut butters, juice, dips, and flours.
From left to right on its display, the Total Blender’s preprogrammed functions include Batters, Ice Crush, Smoothie, Ice Cream, Whole Juice, and Hot Soup. The preprogrammed settings come with specific, pre-set speeds and times, but you can also use the blender based on manual intensity or its pulse function alone.
A bit of Blendtec history
Blendtec was founded in Utah in 1975. Their first product was a grain mill, but they’ve built their brand on blenders. They pioneered technologies like preprogrammed cycles and blunt safety blades, and in 2006, they ran a YouTube series called Will It Blend?. The series blended objects like iPhones and marbles to prove that, yes, you really can blend a lot of things with a Blendtec.
What I think most people will recognize Blendtec from—or, at least, what I recognize Blendtec from—is much more current. They’re the go-to blender of many smoothie and bubble tea shops, like Booster Juice and Jamba Juice. These high-volume commercial outlets use the brand’s higher-grade commercial models, but their shape and branding is recognizable.
What I like using the Total Blender for (and what I made for this review)
Because the Total Blender is such a great all-around product, I tested it out with two of my most difficult go-to recipes. These are things that I make all the time, but that I know not every blender can handle.
The first one is a nut-based pasta sauce. I like to use cashews for these: they create a really creamy, rich sauce, but add more protein and healthy fats to your dish than a regular tomato sauce would. Most blenders can crush nuts no problem, but many struggle to get the sauce smooth enough to not notice the inclusion of nuts. (There’s a world of difference between nut butter and crushed nuts!) The Total Blender did a fantastic job with this sauce. Each nut morsel was blended until it was perfectly smooth, and from its texture, you really couldn’t tell that the sauce had any nuts in it at all. My final result has the texture and lightness of soup.
The second is a smoothie—kind of. I call these my “faux-Juliuses,” and they’re my current favourite slightly-guilty treat. They’re loosely based around the idea of an Orange Julius, but I use frozen limeade concentrate and high-protein milk in my recipe. These are a tough one for most blenders to pull off because there’s so much ice in them. Again, the Blendtec Total Blender absolutely crushed this challenge (pun intended). There were no large ice chunks left in my drink, which was stiff and icy. It was thick enough to bend my straw if I tried to stir with it, and I didn’t need to add any extra liquid or time to get it there. (Think the texture of a thick Blizzard rather than a slush—just perfect.)
My experience with this Blendtec blender
Out of all the blenders I’ve ever tried—and there have been many—I think this is my new favourite. It’s a basic blender that’s easy to use and easy to clean, and it does its job very well. I got better results with the Blendtec Total Blender than I’ve gotten from any other blender. Similar high-end home blenders have come close, but the Blendtec did the best job with crushing ice that I’ve seen so far. It also did the best job that I’ve seen with small-volume (one cup) recipes. For small or one-person households, that’s a huge boon. Many excellent blenders struggle to perform at single-serving sizes in multi-serving jars, but this one doesn’t.
One caveat that I have about this blender is that I’m not a fan of its lid. The Wildside+ lid’s flexible design makes it easy to take off, but difficult to put on. It also leaks first from its edges rather than its centre. As a result, if you accidentally overfill your blender, you can end up with quite a mess on your countertop before you even notice that it’s leaking.
In conclusion
If you’re looking for a home blender that’s simple but extremely effective, the Blendtec Total Blender is an excellent choice. It does a great job of puréeing, blending, and crushing. I can see this being a top-tier choice for really difficult home blending jobs like crushing ice or making bone meal, and this blender will absolutely dominate at tasks like making soup or smoothies. If you’re asking yourself “will it blend,” the answer for the Blendtec Total Blender is, quite definitively, yes.
Shop the Blendtec Total Blender online, exclusively available at Best Buy Canada.
