Earlier this year, not long before moving to Den Haag, the Inner Mammal was in John Lewis in Newcastle in the company of M, who was visiting the North East for cultural reasons (a live performance of songs from The Wicker Man followed by a late-night screening).
As we went in from the bus station through the kitchenware section, our attention was caught by the sight of a small crowd gathered around a lady who was clearly demonstrating something or other to a rapt audience. Moving forward to see the show, we too stood slack-jawed and amazed at the spectacle.
The piece of kit being demonstrated was the Vita-Mix, a US invention of long standing now being promoted in the UK. It is basically a blender, but put your standard blender experience out of your mind: this was a weapons-grade blender with a true capacity for shock and awe.
Two tasks in particular had us all staring in fascinated disbelief. First, the demonstrator whanged in a series of raw ingredients (those given in the previous post) and blended them together to form a soup. So what? I hear the sceptical ask: she liquidized a bunch of vegetables – big deal. But the magic came when she left the blender running, and after 6 minutes or so the soup was cooked. Apparently, the motor is so powerful that the heat created from just letting the blades run on was enough to heat the mixture all by itself. She poured the result into little cups for the audience to taste, and it was delicious.
The second marvel went to the other extreme. Again, some basic ingredients were added – frozen fruit or ice, whole fruit, etc – and the Vita-Mix switched on and left to run. This time, left to its own devices, it created ice-cream. Once again, the power of the blades was such that it rapidly broke down the ice or frozen ingredients so thoroughly that they froze the entire mixture as it gelled together; and, of course, one could accompany this with a hot chocolate sauce created from scratch within minutes afterwards. As with the soup, the proof of the pudding was in the eating.
What made this stand out from other demonstrations of cooking aids was that there was no trickery involved and no special skills that would be found sadly lacking in oneself when trying it out at home. Although the demonstrator carried out the procedures with the ease and insouciance of the excellent saleswoman that she was, it really was just a matter of adding the ingredients in the correct order, switching it all on, and waiting for the requisite time. The worst complication was that the stuff might not always blend easily to start with, but there is a special attachment to get over this by pushing the ingredients onto the blades, so no real problem. For once, what you saw was what you got.
Fired up by the vision of soups and desserts produced in minutes, as well as all of the usual things you would expect of a blender (and it substitutes for a juicer, too, and breaks fruit and vegetables down so finely that pips and stalks and all can be left attached), the Mammal found itself forking out hard-earned cash for this marvellous machine. And today, for lunch, the new toy was finally removed from its packaging and put to the test in making the very Thai ginger soup demonstrated in John Lewis: it passed with flying colours.
A word of warning: even with a very hefty special discount on the day, it was by far the most expensive piece of mobile kitchen equipment we had ever bought. So if you tend to buy gadgets and then leave them unused, don't even think about it. But if, like the Mammal, you find your steamers, slow cookers, bread-makers and such to be regular and indispensable standbys, the Vita-Mix might engage your curiosity, not to mention impress your friends.
You can watch it in action at https://www.vitamix.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=85&Itemid=103, and find out all you could want to know and more at the parent web-site, http://www.vitamix.com/index_int.asp.
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