Blenders and juicers are essential kitchen appliances. They both make the work of grinding veggies and extraction of juices easy. However each has distinctive features and uses. Let’s take a look at blenders. Blenders are kitchen appliances used to mix or stir together foods and other substances.
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TYPES OF BLENDER
There are countless different types of blender in market. It all depends on what you want and what’s best for you. Though from a technical point of view only two types of blenders are widely used available in the market.
Let’s proceed with the first type, which is
Immersion Blender:
Also called hand-held or stick blender. This blender is actually small, long and thin with blades on one side and you hold on the other side.
Immersion blenders are the suitable selection to blend diverse thinner drinks, including soups, smoothies and also for blending soft components like fruits and vegetables.
Immersion blenders are of different types, which are:
- Cheap hand blenders without attachments
- Stick blenders with attachment
- Cordless, battery operated hand blenders
- Commercial heavy duty immersion blenders
Cocktail Blenders
This blender is used to prepare cocktail drinks because it is strong enough to crush ice and you can make more than one cocktail drinks for one or more persons regularly.
Cocktail blenders are of different types, which are
- Dual Wave Cocktail Blenders
- Margarita Blenders
- Countertop Blender
These are the popular type of blenders and this is what most people buy, It can also be called jar or jug blender. This type of blender is usually stationary and heavier than immersion blenders. Counter top blenders can perform many tasks like pureeing, milkshakes, smoothies.
Smoothie Blenders
It’s quite true you can make smoothies with different types of blender. The difference is the kind of results you want to get from various ingredients and how long it takes to get your healthy drinks. A smoothie blender handles you smoothie drinks perfectly.
TYPES OF JUICERS
Just as there are several types of blender, in juicers there are three major types, which are Centrifugal, Masticating and Triurating.
Centrifugal Juicers
Centrifugal juicers work like a washing machine on a spin cycle. How centrifugal works is that the fruit or vegetable is inserted into a chute and a shredder plate at the bottom shreds fruit or vegetable and spins the shredded pulp into basket. The spinning motion is much like that of a washing machine.
Masticating Juicers
Masticating juicers use a slow rotating auger to crush fruit or vegetables against a stainless steel mesh screen at low rpm and minimal oxidation. Juice flows through the mesh screen then dumped into a container, the pulp goes out a separate exit point into another catcher.
Triurating Or Twin Gear Juicer
Triurating juicers use two gears that interlock and looks similar to a car’s transmission gear. These gears shred then squeeze juice out of fruits or vegetables. The slight glitch is that it will not work well on wheatgrass since wheatgrass are dry and the friction will cause a great deal of foam. Triurating juicers work best for leafy green vegetables. Baby food, sorbets and peanut butter.
OTHER TYPES OF JUICERS
- Citrus juicer
- Wheatgrass juicer
- Press juicer
- Champion juicer.
Uses Of Blender
Everyone has a blender for home use, most people use blender for homemade smoothie every morning for breakfast; for healthy diet plan, or even for the occasional margarita. In fact blenders can be used to prepare consumables of different food items like;
Almond milk
If you love drinking almond milk, then making homemade almond milk will spark your taste buds away. Just soak almonds overnight in water and blend them well, strain and enjoy deliciously fresh almond milk, you can use different sweeten flavours like vanilla, strawberry and also different kinds of nut.
Powdered Sugar
You may have encountered not having sugar around when preparing a sweet treat at the moment. Instead of running to the store, you can use your blender and it will wonderfully turn your plain old sugar unto fluffy powdered sugar so fast.
Body scrub
Not only you can make delicious food with a blender but you can always whoop up something organic and natural for your skin. You can mix olive oil, sea salt and citrus to make a moisturising and refreshing body scrub that takes not less than minutes to prepare.
Juice and smoothies
Blenders can be used in preparing your favourite juice or smoothie. When you cut fruits and vegetables add water in blender and blend away. There are also blenders specially made for smoothies, strained to your liking (you can eat the pulp or leave it, if you want.
Flour
You can freshly mill flour without any fancy equipment or much real effort. Just put some cups of berry wheat in a mill blender, sift and repeat till it’s done, you can also use this method for oats.
Juicer
Juicers are homemade appliances used for extracting juice from fruits, herbs, leafy green and other types of vegetables. Some juicers that are of masticating or twin gear variety perform extra functions such as crushing herbs and spices.
USES OF JUICERS
Just like blender, the uses of juicers are endless. Many juicers are quite resourceful and will be of great help in making different liquid edibles such as baby food, fruit drinks, nut milk and soups.
Here are some things juicers can do for you:
- Banana whips
- Nut butters
- Baby food
- Fruit rolls
- Soups
- Sorbets
Benefits Of Blender
When we talk about the benefits of using blenders, the primary benefits is grinding fruits and vegetables into pulps. Blending breaks down fruits and vegetables while retaining the pulp in which contains fibre. So in essence the food item is being used in total and nothing is being thrown away.
Another benefit of using blenders is that it is multifunctional especially when making ice creams, smoothies, soups, salad dressings, grinding coffee etc; the possibilities are endless.
Blenders could serve as mixers especially when you want a quick fix of milk shakes, soups, purees and smoothies.
BENEFITS OF JUICER
Juicers have an excellent way of separating juice from vegetables and fruits. However, the main functionality of juicer is to give you undiluted 100% natural juice. Juicing concentrates the nutrients found in vegetables and fruits also increase the absorption rate of vitamins and minerals into the body system, which is great in bowel movements.
Also juicing has a unique way of getting large amount of essential nutrients and vitamins quickly without having to do with lots of chewing and minimises risk of overeating.
JUICER AND BLENDER: WHICH IS A BETTER CHOICE?
In comparing and contrasting the use of these great homemade appliances in our everyday use, each has its own advantage and disadvantage. Some are of the opinion that blenders are better than juicers while some are of different opinion that juicers are better than blenders, irrespective of which is better and which is not, it’s important to note that they both serve the same essential purpose. It’s an individual choice; exactly what you want at a given moment.
Juicer machines extract the juice that is water and most nutrients in fruits and vegetables leaving the pulp, and there are no leftover pulps in blending. Blenders pulverise the whole fruits and vegetables to make a smoothie.
WHICH IS HEALTHIEST?
The argument that a blended drink is better than extracted juice largely rests on the claim that you waste a lot of goodness when you are juicing by discarding pulp, whereas you include everything in the drink when blending. This is only half true because with an efficient juicer you are mainly wasting the fibre element of the ingredients. Humans can’t digest plant fibre anyway, although it does provide a useful function as an intestinal broom in the healthy digestive system.
If you generally already get enough fibre in your diet, what is the big advantage to adding more in the form of blended vegetable drinks? The whole point of removing the fibre when juicing is so that you can consume the liquid nutritional contents of a larger quantity of fruit and vegetables and get a super-dose of phytonutrients.
Some tips for juicing and/or blending
- To prevent excess sugars, limit the fruit in both juices and smoothies to 1-2 servings per drink (i.e. ½ cup to 1 cup fruit)
- Green veggies like kale, spinach, parsley, and cabbage surprisingly do not taste very intense in smoothies or juice, so load up on those!
- Citrus, lime juice in particular, can help to cut out any bitter taste from vegetables (remember to remove the peels)
- When juicing, high water content vegetables like cucumbers and celery will help to add volume and nutrients
- When blending smoothies, add regular or coconut water to make it less pulpy
- You get what you pay for when buying a juicer or a blender: the current products claiming to have benefits over other standard blenders tend to have higher horsepower
