This tastes better than Smoothie project #5 in my opinion.

  • 1 banana
  • 1 orange
  • 1 celery stick
  • 2 leaves of white cabbage
  • 1 handful of frozen black berries
  • 1 cup of water

I also added some powdered egg+milk protein I had lying around (got it on freecycle). I doubt it affects the taste much.

I think I could easily kill the blender if I wanted to. I would simply set it on liquify, which is the second highest setting, and press start. This would quickly overload and overheat the engine much like starting a stick shift car in the 2nd gear by flooring it and dropping the clutch(*). You can think of this as impedance or inertia, that is, resistance to change. Unless one has access to overwhelming force, frozen and tough food have to be processed gradually.

I start at one of the slowest settings and run a few pulses. This cuts up the stuff on the bottom. I put the soft stuff, here oranges and bananas, at the bottom for that reason. Once I can’t quite tell the ingredients apart and I don’t hear any crunches from the blades hitting the frozen ingredients anymore, I switch over to higher settings and let it run continuously for 10 seconds at a time. I use a duty cycle of about 60% letting the engine cool down again.

I mention this because DW was going all out and abusing the blender the other day causing it to smell like burnt electronics. I managed to stop her/it before it melted down, but it left me wondering how many blenders die an early death due to not knowing their limitations.