Jun 10, 2023 9:00 AM

The Best Blenders for Making Smoothies, Soups, and Sauces

The perfect kitchen companion, these versatile blenders can whip up breakfast, dinner party dips, and everything in between.

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Closeup of a person making a smoothie in a blender with fruits and vegetables

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A good blender is flexible enough to make a range of sauces, soups, smoothies, and more—it’s a countertop staple that will come in handy while cooking a range of sweet and savory foods, season after season. We’ve tested the latest designs by blending smoothies, nut milks, and pancake mixes for breakfast, as well as blitzing fresh, nutrient-dense dips, sauces, and soups for dinner. The blenders we recommend have been built with durability and style in mind, with features designed for everyday cooking and baking tasks, and will come in useful for aspiring pro-chefs and even the most apathetic of home cooks among us.

For more of WIRED's kitchen guides, check out our Best Air Fryers, Best Electric Kettles, Best Latte and Cappuccino Machines, and the Best Gear for Small Kitchens.

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Photograph: iprogressman/Getty Images
How to Shop for Blenders
There’s a wide range of powerful jug blenders, hand blenders, and personal blenders to choose from online. A personal blender is ideal for whipping up single servings of smoothies and shakes and can be blended in the same cup as you can drink it from. If it comes with a swappable travel lid, it can be a great option to take to work or the gym. Meanwhile, a jug blender works well as a permanent fixture on the countertop and can house a lot more liquid than a standard personal blender. These more traditional designs work best for puréeing vegetables for sauces and soups, but also give you a lot more flexibility when cooking, as they tend to have a multifunctional base that can house a selection of jug sizes with interchangeable blades. Some can also take on hot liquids for smoothing hearty soups.
A more compact alternative is the trusty immersion blender—otherwise known as a stick blender—that can be pulled out of the cupboard when you need to mix double cream for the top of your meringue dessert or mix smaller portions. Their size makes them easy to store away in the kitchen cupboard or drawer to free up space on your countertop. For the most practical and impressive design, look for blenders with bases that can work with multiple jug options for various tasks, and jugs that are shatterproof for safety. Vacuum blending technology that sucks the oxygen out of the jug before blending is another feature to look for, which will ensure your smoothies taste fresher for longer. Blenders that come with an accompanying smart app are great for recipe inspiration too.
Photograph: Ninja
Best All-Rounder
Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System with Auto-iQ
Ninja’s Professional Plus Kitchen System with Auto-iQ has an impressive spec, which makes it great value for money. In the box, you get a good mix of tools to suit the food you’re blending, chopping, crushing, or mixing. In addition to a tall 72-ounce Total Crushing Pitcher, you get two single-serve cups with spout lids and a 64-ounce Precision Processor bowl. The set comes with a mix of blades, including a total crushing blade, one for chopping, one designed for whizzing up smoothies, and a dough blade—all of which add to its versatility and powerful performance. Its 1400-peak watt motor base sits securely on the kitchen countertop, and I found it easy to interchange the base with the cup blender, the pitcher, and the precision processor bowl and a choice of suitable blade. This gave me the flexibility to either create smoothies for post-workout fuel, purée sauces for pre-dinner dips, or crush ice for evening cocktails.
The Ninja blender's black and stainless steel finish feels premium and looks good in the kitchen. I found that leaving the base on the countertop and storing the jugs and cups in the cupboard until use worked well to keep my countertop looking clutter-free. The set comes with dishwasher-safe parts, including the blades. If you are washing them by hand you’ll need to take care, as the blades are very sharp and designed to blitz tough food in seconds.
On board, you get five preset programs to eliminate guesswork and make it easy to carry out a number of blending and processing tasks, always reliably with excellent, consistent results. You can choose from a low, medium, high, and pulse setting. The settings include one for smoothies, one for crushing ice, and a nutrient extraction setting. There’s also a chop setting that’s great for nut butters and vegetables, and a dough setting that lets you create up to 2 pounds of dough when using the processor bowl. This means that you can use the kitchen system to both purée soups and then make dough for fresh bread to dip inside. —Emily Peck
★ UK Alternative: The UK version of this Ninja blender has much the same powerful, useful functionality. Their wattage varies slightly: 1200W for the UK version as opposed to 1400W, and the US version has two blender cups to the UK’s single 700-ml cup.
$220 at Best Buy
$168 at Walmart
$220 at Ninja
Photograph: Breville
If Money’s No Object
Breville the Super Q
The fancy car of the blender category, the Super Q (8/10) is stylish and powerful. There are a few presets, notably a high-functioning smoothie button that lets you wander off to butter your toast while your kale is being liquified. It also has a smoothie cup that you can blend in and drink from, which saves space in the dishwasher. You shall never want for something with more oomph, even when making something like a nut butter that might melt the motor of the inferior competition. You can even use that power to make something like a green-pea soup, heated to serving temperature using nothing but the friction of the blades, a trick that will never cease to amaze me.
I loved using it as a spice mill for jobs larger than my Krups spice grinder can handle, along with liquefying onions and garlic for a barbecue sauce. I loved it for whizzing up a Simon Hopkinson green sauce one day and a butter chicken sauce for a Madhur Jaffrey recipe on another. On a hot summer day, I made frozen margaritas that left no one disappointed and everyone pleasantly giddy. I do wish the vortex in the blender jar were a bit stronger, and while the "Q" in its name is for "quiet," it isn't. —Joe Ray
$547 at Amazon
$550 at Walmart
$550 at Breville
$380 at Sage
Photograph: Nutribullet
Great for Hot Ingredients
Nutribullet ZNBF30500Z Blender Combo
NutriBullet is best known for its personal “bullet“ style blenders, but it also sells a range of classic jug blenders. The Blender Combo gives you the best of both. You can use this base to switch between a traditional pitcher jug for larger quantities up to 64 ounces and one of the bullet-style jugs with a 32-ounce capacity. With its powerful 1200-watt output, the Blender Combo can perform a range of jobs from crushing ice to blending warm liquids. Not all blenders take on warm liquids successfully, but the large, vented pitcher on this does—handy when you’ve made a soup and don’t want to have to wait for it to cool down before blending smoothly or pulsing to a chunky finish.
The design is evenly balanced—the bullet top clicks on as smoothly as the jug pitcher. It comes with three variable speed settings and a pulse function, which makes it easy to make a range of dips, sauces, nut butters, smoothies, and batters with different consistencies—from super-smooth soup to chunkier guacamole. There’s also an extract button that can be used to break down whole fruits, vegetables, and ice for nutrient-rich smoothies. While I found this created quite a few bubbles when used, these soon disappeared and the texture proved consistent and the taste delicious.
In addition to soup and dip, I made a raspberry, cocoa, and banana smoothie with ice and oak milk. While it isn’t the quietest blender I’ve come across, I was impressed with how quickly it crushed the ice and blitzed the raspberry seeds so they didn’t leave that grainy texture you can sometimes get when blending berries. Overall, I’d say this is a great option if you’re after a flexible design that doesn’t have too many fiddly parts to contend with. Its streamlined and fuss-free design and dishwasher-safe parts also mean it’s easy to wash after use. —Emily Peck
$120 at Walmart
$120 at Amazon

Photograph: Vitamix
For No-Nonsense Home Cooks
Vitamix 5200
This is perhaps the best example of a kitchen product pared down to elemental perfection. With just two switches and a dial, along with great design and power to spare, the 5200 can do it all. Of course, testing included smoothies, lassis, frozen margs, and salad dressings, but I steered hard into Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral's excellent cookbook, Oaxaca: Home Cooking From The Heart of Mexico, which relies on blenders to make moles, adobo, and chileajo. With dried avocado leaves in the mix with black bean paste, chiles, garlic, and onion, pasta de frijol negro sounds like it might leave you picking little bits of dried leaf from your teeth after dinner, but in the Vitamix, it's silky smooth.
It always conquered whichever potentially difficult-to-blend ingredient I threw in the jar, yet it can still function delicately enough to pull off a whipped cream for dessert. Much of the ease of use comes from the comparatively tall and skinny blender jar, which creates the perfect vortex, effectively sucking everything down into the blades, ensuring a perfect purée. —Joe Ray
$480 at Vitamix
$449 at Amazon
Photograph: Nutribullet
Simple Touchscreen Controls
Nutribullet Smart Touch Blender
The sophisticated-looking NutriBullet Smart Touch Blender comes with a 1500-watt motor base with a 64-ounce pitcher. There’s a locking lid on the pitcher with a spout for mess-free pouring, and the set comes complete with a tamper for pushing down ingredients while you blend and a recipe booklet for inspiration. I particularly appreciated how the touchscreen display lights up against the black finish backdrop on this stylish blender.
The choice of settings is generous too, with four precision programs tailored to the ingredients you’re blending. This includes a purée setting, one for soups, one for frozen drinks, and one for smoothies. There are also three-speed controls and a pulse function for even more flexibility. Like the slightly cheaper NutriBullet Blender Combo, this design can also take hot liquids with the vented pitcher lid attached—although airing on the side of caution, I’d never pour anything too hot in any blender and always wait for the liquid to be warm as opposed to piping hot before blending. When I used the Smart Touch Blender to purée some lentil, carrot, and celery soup using the soup setting, I liked how evenly it mixed the ingredients without me having to use the tamper too much to push them down. I was able to stop when the blender reached the ideal consistency. —Emily Peck
$170 at Amazon
$119 at Best Buy
$120 at Walmart

Emily Peck is a journalist with 20+ years experience writing about interiors, food, wellbeing, gardens, technology and everything in-between. She has held in-house positions at the BBC and Ideal Home magazine, and regularly contributes to WIRED, GQ, The Telegraph, Livingetc, Techradar and GoodtoKnow.

WIRED contributor