Once a rarefied chef’s tool, the Vitamix has become a kitchen-appliance status symbol.
Every morning, I make a round of smoothies—or “noise,” to use the patois of my two-year-old son. When I first unpacked my Vitamix 750, a professional-grade blender with a 2.2.-peak-horsepower motor that has the same maximum output as a small moped, I told him that I was going to “make some noise.” The name stuck. The instant the blades start turning, he holds up his little arms and makes fists with his tiny hands in the universal gesture for “I win.”
He’s articulating how I feel. My Vitamix 750 makes me happy. It’s beautiful in its utilitarian way: stocky and heavy. The bulky controls are instinctive and tactile. You want to turn it on. It looks less like a kitchen gadget than like the kind of tool you see in a glassed-in auto-body shop where the mechanics play German opera.
More than that, it works. Before the Vitamix, I went through four blenders in ten years, including the very expensive and shiny one that my wife owned when I met her and that she let me sell because she believes in me. None of these machines functioned particularly well. All were prone to cavitation—blender-speak for the air pocket that forms above the blades. A blender should blend, and when you have to baby it to get it to do its job you start to think dark thoughts. You can hate a blender. You can love one, too. My Vitamix runs with such brutal efficiency that when I go to the market I look at what’s on the shelves and in the produce aisles and think, I could blend you.
My wife tells me that it has changed how I cook. She’s right. Initially I used the Vitamix to make the same smoothies I tried with other blenders—usually frozen fruit with a scoop of a healthy powder that I was told would roll back the hands of time. But then I started throwing in bits and pieces I once set aside for composting: kale ends, overripe pears, fibrous pineapple cores. A Vitamix will chop and pulverize the nutrition found in skins and seeds and other unappetizing parts of food into something smooth and drinkable. Add parsley stems to a couple of quartered apples, some lemon juice, a knob of ginger, some coconut water, and a few ice cubes, and you get a drink with the same sensory pleasure as a nice glass of wine. I’ve blended roasted parsnips with stock and a touch of apple juice into a soup so light and pure that I could imagine serving it in a shot glass with a touch of caviar. The 750 even has a soup mode that gets the blades spinning for what seems an eternity, almost six minutes, a stretch of time that would have trashed any of my previous blenders but which is a jog around the block for the Vitamix. The friction heats the puree to a temperature just this side of a low simmer—when you lift off the lid, you can watch the steam rise.
Vitamix so dominates the high-end-blender market that chefs I talk to reflexively use its name (you don’t make a bisque in a blender, you “blitz the shells in a Vitamix”). It’s a powerful identity for a 94-year-old Ohio-based company that, until recently, sold almost entirely via direct order. The Vitamix is the American-made machine at the heart of our smoothie revolution, what you see behind the counters at chains such as Jamba Juice and Liquiteria and at boutiques such as Moon Juice, whose three exquisite shops in Los Angeles draw a steady crowd of young women with perfect skin and free afternoons. It also has a place in popular culture. Last fall, Saturday Night Live aired a fake Vitamix ad that had a twitchy Sarah Silverman letting blender envy get the better of her; the following month, Monday Night Football put a Vitamix on the air to poke fun at Chip Kelly, the innovative coach of the Philadelphia Eagles who has made smoothies a part of his team’s workout regimen. A clip of ESPN commentator Jon Gruden smirking at a banana before dropping it in the Vitamix was the talk of professional football that week.
A Vitamix also happens to be expensive, which has turned it into an object of desire for some and an object of ridicule for others. The S30, a slimmed-down model introduced last year, retails for $409; the 5200, which is the workhorse that most home consumers buy, starts at $449. The one on my counter, the new-generation 750, is $639, which makes it about $350 more than any other blender I have bought—and about $350 less than the combined sum of the four I never liked. I could have saved so much money by spending more on a Vitamix.
Besides, it feels good to treat yourself to something nice. Just before the chef Elise Kornack opened Take Root, a small restaurant on a side street in Carroll Gardens, a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood of leafy brownstones and good schools, she bought a Vitamix after coming into some cash on her birthday. Kornack was cooking at Aquavit at the time, but she knew she was going to open a restaurant with her wife, Anna Hieronimus, running the front of house. The restaurant they created isn’t quite like any other in New York. Intimate and refined, Take Root has twelve seats, serves a $120 tasting menu, and is open only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. When the 2015 Michelin Guide gave it one star, reservations—released on Take Root’s Web site 30 days in advance at the stroke of midnight—began disappearing in minutes.
Kornack has no employees. There is no line cook, no prep cook, no dishwasher, no assistant—Kornack does all of the work herself. For her the Vitamix is more than an appliance; it opens what she calls “the range of possibility” of what she can get out of an ingredient. She uses it in her take on clam chowder, which is made with roasted macadamias and clam stock pulverized into a fine and silky puree that seems as if it were made with dairy, even though it wasn’t (the creaminess is from the emulsified nut oils). Served with shucked clams and steamed baby turnips, the dish is so light and pretty that it feels like a daydream.
The Vitamix 750 in my kitchen isn’t just slicing at high speed like a supercharged robot with a chef’s knife, it’s crushing with great force as well, like a supercharged robot with a mortar and pestle. The motor counts for a lot, but just as important is the circulation. A Vitamix’s blades don’t line up—they’re not symmetrical. Each of the four blades is bent at a slightly different angle to better distribute what it’s blending.
“I can tell when somebody doesn’t use the Vitamix for something like grinding lemongrass. It tastes metallic,” says chef Andrea Reusing, who won a James Beard Award for her work at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Reusing uses a Vitamix to make hot sauce from whole chiles harvested the previous summer that she’s salted, pressed, and fermented. “You’re getting the whole chili, the seeds and the skin and everything,” she says. The Vitamix turns it into a slurry so fine that it doesn’t need to be strained.
“The SNL thing makes fun of you having this $600 status symbol,” says Charles Babinski of G&B Coffee, an influential open-air coffee bar in downtown Los Angeles. Babinski, who recently won the 2015 U.S. Barista Championship, and his business partner, Kyle Glanville, use a Vitamix to make fresh almond-macadamia milk for iced lattes—sometimes as much as 100 liters a day. “It was weird to see something that’s a regular part of your life, such a functional part of your life, get spoofed on TV.”
“It just obliterates the shit out of what you put in there,” adds Glanville. “If I see a Vitamix in somebody’s home, I learn a lot about that person. It means you actually care about how you make a thing.”
Such is the buzz around Vitamix. If it seems as if you’re hearing about it more, that’s because you are. For every cynic there are multiple converts, which is why the Vitamix Venn diagram is steadily expanding and now covers Michelin-starred chefs, professional athletes, hot sauce–makers, and my two-year-old son. If you were running for office, that coalition would win you the election.
A Vibrant Avocado and Cardamom Smoothie Recipe to Make in Your Vitamix, Courtesy of Sqirl Chef Jessica Koslow:
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