You may recall the episode of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson attached a V8 engine to a food
blender and made a smoothie from beef, chillies, Tabasco sauce...and a brick. Well
if Mr. Clarkson had a Vitamix Professional Series 500 he wouldn’t have bothered
with his experiment. To paraphrase Jeremy, this device is quite simply the
scariest domestic appliance...........in the world!
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| The scariest domestic appliance......in the world! |
If you’ve ever been to Starbucks and ordered a frappuccino
you will have seen one of these in action. Milk, syrup (or coffee) and ice
blended by a machine with a two horsepower motor that spins the blades at 240
miles per hour. Last week I bought one. It wasn’t my intention to do so, but
Val and I went to the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court and after a couple of
hours of mooching round the exhibits, including Virgin Media’s stand (and more
of that later), we gravitated to the food section.
Among the demonstrations was the Vitamix stand. The
demonstrator was making smoothies and soups, ice cream and coffees and the
amazing thing was that the ingredients went in pretty much whole; a whole
pepper (stem and seeds included), carrots, cabbage and ice. And that was in the
ice cream (frozen yoghurt and some fruit as well). In fact if you have a
problem with your children eating vegetables, get one of these and make some
ice cream with carrot and cabbage included, I guarantee that they will not
notice.
The demonstration was quite impressive and the finished
products were really tasty. The bonus is that you can use pretty much all of
the fruit or vegetable; skin, peel, stem et
al included. Startlingly the machine makes soup without a heat source; the
speed of the blades creates sufficient friction to heat the liquid in six to
seven minutes.
Naturally, this being the Ideal Home Show the payoff is that
they are trying to sell you something at every stand and a strong will is
required not to spend a small fortune, but seduced by the prospect of
smoothies, soups and ice cream pretty much to order we decided that buying one
was probably a good idea, so we did. Not the top of the range machine you
understand but the more modestly priced Vitamix TNC in black, which still
weighs in at £450.00
So we dragged it home on the tube, skimmed through the
recipes and the next morning, which was a Saturday, plugged the machine in and
made a smoothie. This was when the infernal machine made its bid to be the
scariest domestic appliance I have ever encountered. We added the ingredients
and switched the machine on. Boy is it loud! The ambient noise at the Ideal
Home Show had masked exactly how loud this thing is, so it was quite startling
to hear it in our kitchen. The funny thing was that it was all sound and no
action; the machine appeared to be labouring and the strawberries, banana,
orange and ice didn’t seem to be blending terribly well. I turned up the speed
and still it was labouring so I turned it up to the highest setting. There was
a loud bang. Blue smoke emanated from the machine and the downstairs ring main
fused. This was accompanied by an unnerving electrical burning smell. Something
was quite obviously not right.
Having recovered our composure we decided that the best
course of action was to return the machine to Vitamix. Over the years, Val and
I have established a zero tolerance policy on faulty products and the like, so
we packed the machine up and set off to Earls Court in search of a refund. It being Saturday parts of the tube network
were closed for engineering work and as it was snowing we decided to drive the
twenty odd miles through central London to Earls Court. This had all the
makings of an epic saga, fraught with difficulties. Remarkably it was a stress
free experience; we even found a parking spot in a side road five minutes walk
from the exhibition centre.
We lugged the box up to the Vitamix stand and asked for a
refund on the grounds that we had lost a teeny bit of confidence in the
product. We were initially offered an exchange; a deal we were reluctant to
accept. The manager came and we explained what had happened; by chance the
manager was the chap who had demonstrated the machine to us the day before. He
took the machine into a back room. Suddenly we became aware that the
demonstrations around us had stopped and it had all gone very quiet; we heard
laughter. The manager emerged from the back room, shaking his head. He told us
we had a duff machine; they had tested it and fused all of the electrics on the
stand! He said we could have a refund or could exchange the faulty machine for
a free upgrade to the professional model (worth an extra £150, this model is
programmable). We dithered for a few moments then decided to go for the
upgrade.
Back at home we plugged in our new machine, filled it with
the ingredients for soup and somewhat nervously switched it on. Blessedly it worked perfectly, but boy is it
unnerving! For a start it’s noisy; you can’t hold a conversation when it is
running and although you know it must be safe, you fear that at any moment it will
come adrift from its moorings and run amok around the kitchen. Once you get
over that it does make exceedingly good soup!
This isn’t an advertising puff (I’m not being paid to say
this), but the Vitamix is quite exceptional and now that we’ve got used to the
noise and fury we are producing gallons of delicious smoothies and soups.
Finally, while we were at the show we also visited the
Virgin Media stand, more out of devilment and the opportunity for a rant than
anything. Would you like to sign up for Virgin Media? we were asked. We
explained (briefly) our experiences last year with Virgin[1].
The salesman said he couldn’t see why we couldn’t have their broadband
installed (well he would wouldn’t he, he’s probably on commission), so we have
a surveyor coming in a couple of weeks to see if cable can be connected to our house,
which should be interesting. I am not getting excited after last year’s
debacle!
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