This is John Kohler with DiscountJuicers.com.
Today we’re going to answer a very important question that seems to come up lately.
And the question is simply this: John, what’s the difference between a food processor, which
I have over here, and a blender?
There is some confusion out there that some people that the blender and the food processor
are basically the same thing and you need either one or the other, but you don’t need
both.
Well nothing could be further than the truth.
So both these machines, whether it’s the food processor or the blender, and I have
2 different kinds here, work a little bit differently.
Now, I guess to explain this, for those of you that are into statistics, or go back to
your statistics class in school, but we have what’s called a Venn diagram.
So this Venn diagram was created by John Venn to show relationships.
So in this case we have the blender in a big circle at the top, and a food processor or
a big circle, on the bottom.
So you can see here, there’s an area of overlap.
And the area of overlap is the area that both machines perform similar functions.
That being said, while they perform similar functions, they do them completely differently.
And I’ll explain those in a minute.
But the functions that are similar in both machines is that they can mix, chop, and blend.
But that’s where the similarities end because also there are sections that the blender can
do that the food processor can’t do.
And there’s things that a food processor can definitely do that a blender can’t do.
So what we’re going to do today is we’re going to go over some of these differences
between the different appliances.
So first, let’s introduce the different appliances that I’m going to share with
you today.
On this side, we have the Omega Food Pro food processor.
This is an 11 cup food processor with a full 5 year warranty.
It’s very important when you’re buying any kitchen appliance or any appliance you’re
going to use a lot, you want to make sure it has a long warranty.
Once again, a long warranty is your assurance that product will work for that many years
without any problems because the manufacturer is going to repair or replace it at no cost
for you.
Some appliances, whether it’s a blender of food processor may come with a short 90
day warranty, and we know if the item fails during that time on the 91st day, you pretty
much got to buy a new one.
So it pays to spend a lil bit more for a machine that has a longer warranty that you don’t
have to buy the extended warranty for.
Over on this side, we have the VitaMix turbo-blend VS.
The VS stands for variable speed.
So this is a variable speed blender.
It comes with the BPA free craft and a tamper that actually helps you push things into the
blender.
We’ll be talking more about that in a second.
Finally, we have the BlendTech Champ HP3A.
This model basically comes with a 64 ounce craft, or 96 ounce craft.
This is the wild side craft, the large craft.
And we’re going to talk about this in a second.
This one does not include a tamper, and both these machines actually have a seven year
warranty.
So the VitaMix has had a 7 year for a long time, and the BlendTech just changed their
warranty on their machine to be 7 years to compete with the VitaMix.
So next, let’s talk about how these appliances differ and how they are the same.
So you can see here, these two guys are blenders, and the main purpose of blenders in my opinion,
are for one thing.
To blend liquids!
Once again, I’ll say it again, blenders are meant for blending liquids, and that’s
what they do really good, although they can do other processes.
Other things blenders can do are like pulverize seeds into flour.
If you have a high power blender, most common household blenders will not do this.
For example, you could take flax seeds, put it into one of these high power blenders,
and turn it into a flax powder.
And that’s a function that actually the food processor will not do.
It just doesn’t spin at a fast enough speed to basically fractionate the grains into a
powder.
So these high power blenders will also grind up your common cereal grains into a flour
as well.
In fact, the VitaMix actually has a dry container that’s used for grinding dry things such
as the grains, the cereal grains.
But once again, you know, the wet container will blend or grind up grains, maybe just
not as effectively as a dry container.
So for people that are into living a raw foods lifestyle, just forget about the dry container.
All you need is a wet container for grinding up flax seeds and powdering up other things.
This one will work find.
Now, if you’re into baking and you want to cook and make flours for baking, in that
case, then the dry container has an optimized blade design to basically blend up and grind
up the grains much more effectively.
So the blender could also chop, so you could put things in here to chop.
Now, I wanted to describe the different blade configurations on these two blenders, or actually
other blenders.
This blender has a star blade pattern, so you could see the star in there.
And what happens on this blade design, if you’re trying to chop, you put a whole tomato,
say it’s the size of my fist, you put it in there.
Basically what will happen is the tomato will sit on top of this and the tomato will sit
on top while the blade is spinning because the tomato just wont drop down in between
the blades unless you have some small cherry tomatoes.
What VitaMix does to solve this is they give you a tamper that you can then actually push
into the machine to push that tomato into the blades.
But that being said, once the blades are running, then it‘ll hid the tomato, and if you pulse
it very slowly or run it that long, you’ll get a nice chop.
That being said, it can turn into a puree really quickly.
So that’s why I don’t think the blenders the optimal machine to be chopping in, but
it will do it.
On the BlendTech here, you could see the little different blade designs.
This is the propeller blade design, so you could see here just one single piece of metal
bent up and formed into a blade.
And this one will actually chop better because once again, my hand is a tomato, it could
drop down between the blade, and then the blade will come around and hit it.
So in that case the BlendTech is going to be a more effective food processor than the
VitaMix.
That being said, I still think that the food processor is definitely the best if you want
to chops things up, because that’s really what it’s designed to do.
The blenders will do that, but not too well.
In addition, these guys will also mix.
Once again, you could put your ingredients in there, and once again, the main difference
is these guys excel at processing liquid ingredients.
Now, if you want to process dry ingredients, these guys do kind of work, for the reason
that this one has the wide blade, and something could drop between here and then get processed.
But in often cases, things that’ll dry will actually sit to the sides of the craft and
this blade will spin, and you’ll get what’s called covation.
Covation happens when you don’t have enough liquids in there to blend, because once again,
these are blenders, not mixers.
How VitaMix solved that, is once again, they have that tamper, so you could put stuff in
here and tamper it down to make it go and hit the blade.
So another difference between the blender and the food processor is the revolution per
minute.
So the blender runs at 20,000+ RPMs on these two blenders which are high power blenders
,which is incredibly fast, so that has the power to basically break up fiber cell walls
of greens if you want to make your green smoothie and give you a nice smooth texture when you’re
blending up.
That’s something in a liquid form.
On the food processor, you know it runs magnitudes slower than 20,000 RPMs, probably like 20
times or 40 times slower.
It runs much slower than that.
So it’s not going to actually oxidize your food as fast, but it’s also not going to
chop it up quite as effectively either.
So next let’s go ahead and talk about the food processor, so the Omega Food Pro food
processor comes with a bunch of different blades and configuration, so let’s talk
about that real quick.
Once again, you do have a pusher.
You have one large pusher for feeding in smaller things.
They even give you a small pusher so you can feed in something small like a carrot.
I like that a lot.
You can go ahead and take this apart, and let me show you the bowl on this.
Here’s the bowl, and this standard is called the S blade, because it looks like an S if
you look at.
It looks like an S. and this blade is serrated, so both the blades on the blenders are not
serrated, so this is actually going to be a little bit more effective in cutting than
they will, because they’re designed to blend.
Once again, this blade design, there’s one low and one high.
So what that allows you to do is basically allows the food to drop down, come around
and get hit by the top blade, and then it’ll actually get hit with the bottom blade at
the same time, or right at the second revolution as well, so it’s much more effective to
do those things like chopping and mixing than these blenders are.
So in addition, the food processor, while it will blend, it’s not a good device to
do that.
Because on every blender, it basically has a line on the craft, it says maximum liquid
level.
Because once again, food processors are not necessarily for blending up liquids, although
it will do that.
And you don’t want to fill it up past the maximum liquid level, because what happens
is the liquid will actually go down in here because this bowl, once again, is not designed
for liquids.
It’s designed for dry things.
The liquid will go down through this shaft, get in your motor, probably void your warrantee
in that case, and make a real big mess.
So besides just the standard S blade that comes with the Omega Food Pro food processor,
there are some other attachments that allow you to do more things.
So in the Omega Food Pro food processor, you also get a dough blade.
Now some food processors come with plastic dough blade.
The dough blade on the Omega Food Pro is a stainless steel dough blade, so if we compare
these two side by side, you could see the S blade’s a lot larger.
The dough blade is a lot smaller, so this is generally recommended for dough or other
uses.
In general you should use the standard S blade that has the serrates, it’s going to work
a lot better than this dough blade, it just has a regular, not even too sharp of a blade
on there.
So another thing the food processor does that the blenders don’t do is slicing and shredding.
So we can go ahead and put this back onto the blender, lock it in place.
We’re going to put this piece in here, lock it in place.
And then we’re going to use these two disks.
So these two disks are not Frisbees, or Asian martial arts equipment.
What they are are a slicing blade.
And there’s basically a two side slices, it’s a reversible blade.
If you put this side up and it simply goes in like that, and then you’ll put the lid
on.
Anyways, if you put this up, this spins around, and as it’s spinning around, you put things
down the chute.
It’ll basically give you exact precise uniform slices every single time.
And this has two side slices.
It’s basically on this side is a two millimeter slice, so that’s two millimeters.
On this side is double the width of four millimeters.
So that’s really nice, really handy to have the slicing bade.
So next we have the shredding blade.
Once again, you put this adapter in your food processor so that you can use the shredding
blade.
Once again, that just goes on like that.
You have to have the top fully assembled for it to work properly.
There’s a safety interlock on the Omega Food Pro food processor which keeps you safe.
So this is a reversible shredding disk.
On this side, we have two millimeter shreds, and once again you flip that over and we have
the four millimeter shreds over on this side.
So once again the food processor is a little bit more versatile when working with dry,
hard ingredients such as fruits and vegetables.
So my favorite way to use the shredding and slicing disks are to make large salads out
of whole vegetables.
It’s very important, you know when you put a bite of food in your might to chew it up
very well.
And most people don’t chew their food enough to get optimal digestion, so I’d encourage
you to chew 20 to 40 times minimally each mouthful to turn it into a mush so you’re
going to get the best digestion of the food you’re eating.
Because if you don’t digest your food, it’s not going to be a benefit to you.
So that’s why I like the food processor.
The shredding disk will—I like to basically make a salad out of root vegetables like carrots,
really easily.
You can basically put this in here, shred up a whole bunch of carrots in no time, put
a salad dressing over it, have an instant carrot salad.
With the slicing disk, my favorite thing to do is to basically put it in on the two millimeter
side if I’m going to slicing up celery.
So I take the whole celery stalk and I don’t like to eat celery because those strings always
get stuck in my teeth.
When you put it through the food processor with the slicing disk, it makes small little
slices.
And all that celery that is filled up in the bowl, I just dump that into a big salad bowl,
make a dressing in the blender, because once again a dressing is a liquid and it’ll actually
take raw macadamia nuts and orange juice and basically pulverize the macadamia nuts so
there’s no pieces.
It’s just going to be like an orange cream sauce.
So that’s a job that the food processor won’t do.
So once again, you need the right tool for the right job.
That’s actually something my grandfather told me when I was kid.
Right tool for the right job.
So anyways, slicing up all this celery makes an easy salad.
Dump it into a bowl, make salad dressing in a blender, pour the dressing on, and eat it
up.
And because the celery has been sliced up, there’s no more string to get stuck in your
teeth.
So another excellent use of the food processor to slice and shred up your vegetables.
Another thing I like about the Omega Food Pro food processor is that it comes with a
four cup mini bowl.
So this mini bowl basically just sits into the food processor and it allows you to process
up to four cups.
So one of the things about either the blenders or the food processors is that there’s a
minimum amount of the items that you’re going to process required to put in the blender.
What do I mean?
Well if you put like two drops of water and some whole carrots, it’s not going to blend
effectively.
You need a minimum amount of water and then your item that you’re blending.
So the blender’s actually what you need, you need a minimum amount of liquids to make
it blend properly, otherwise you’re going to get cavitation, the blade’s going to
spin around without it hitting the item you’re trying to blend itup, and it’s just not
going to work effectively.
So if you are loading up your blender to blend something up, I encourage you to put the liquids
first, number one, so if you’re using liquids, put them first.
If you’re just blending up produce that have high water content, you want to put the
high water content items in first.
So if you’re blending in say tomatoes, cilantro, and kale for example, don’t put the kale,
cilantro, and then tomatoes on top.
Put the tomatoes in first.
The things that have the most water, as soon as the blade blow up the tomatoes, all that
will turn into liquid, and that will provide the blender enough liquid so it can continue
to blend well.
So once again, on the food processor there is a minimum amount of the product you’re
going to put in there to make it work properly.
Like if you want to process into brazil nuts into brazil nut butter, and I do have a video
using the Omega Food Pro to do that, if you put in like one brazil nut, it’s going to
chop it up, but it’s not going to make a nice butter, because you need a sufficient
quantity of those nuts in here to make a brazil nut butter.
So that’s what this attachment for the Omega Food Pro comes in handy.
This is a four cup mini bowl for the food processor.
It simply sits in there like that, and you can process much smaller quantities of whatever
you want to process in the food processor and it’s going to work a lot better.
So that’s really simple, really easy.
Now I did mention Brazil nut butter.
All these machines will make nut butters, or Brazil nut butter.
Once again, you need to use a nut that has a high oil content.
Nuts that have low oil content will basically blend up into a powder and then you’ll have
to add some additional oil to get it to blend up or some additional water.
So if you’re making nut butters, and you need to add some of the oil, I’d recommend
using the oil of the nut you’re processing, so if you’re making almond nut butter, you’d
want to add almond oil.
You know, if you don’t have almond oil or it’s too hard to find, you could add some
coconut oil.
I think that’s a nice general one to use.
But that’ll basically get all the powder to congeal.
So that’s the main problem.
These machines have the power to make the nut butters, but most nuts don’t have a
high enough oil content to make it congeal and austate together.
I recommend the food processor for making nut butters, and I have a video on making
Brazil nut butter in the Omega Food Pro.
It works really well.
Brazil nuts have a high enough oil content.
Another one that has high enough oil content is macadamia nuts.
If you do want to make almond butter, put the almonds in there.
You’re going to get an almond flour.
You just need to let it run and run, and finally it should start to cache and clumping together.
But if it doesn’t, then what I like to do instead of adding the almond oil like I recommended
earlier.
Start dropping one, two, three macadamia nuts, because the macadamia nuts have a high enough
oil content, so they you have an almond nut, macadamia nut butter together, but then you
won’t have to add any additional oil, so I don’t like to really use additional oils
in my diet.
They actually add a lot of fat.
But using real nuts in my opinion are a lot better.
So the same things can be done with a BlendTech and the VitaMix.
If I had to pick one of these, to make the nut butters, the VitaMix would be better only
because we have the tamper.
But once again, if your mixture is not oily enough or have enough oil content, you’re
going to get covation, and it’s just not going to work well.
So hopefully you’ve learned some of the differences between the blenders and the food
processors.
Once again, to sum it up, all these machines will do basically blending, chopping, and
mixing, but each one will do a certain job better.
Like the blenders, they’ll obviously blend better.
The food processor is going to mix and chop a lot better than these guys.
Once again, the liquid level could only to be a certain height on the food processor,
and to the blender they could almost go to the top.
You need to leave some air space to basically let the air vent off.
The other thing is if you’re into raw foods and eating higher quality food without oxidizing
your food, the blenders do run at a higher RPM, so they tent to oxidize your food more,
whereas the food processors runs at a lower RPM and will not.
So on the flip side, the food processor doesn’t run at high enough RPM to basically make like
a good quality smoothie because I tactually doesn’t run fast enough to micronize and
break up all the cell walls in your kale in your green smoothie, for example.
But I mean, it will work.
So if you have one you can kind of use it for those purposes, but it’s definitely
not the same.
So in the long run, I’d definitely recommend you buy a food processor, and I like the Omega
Food Pro food processor or a blender between the VitaMix and the Champ HP3A.
They’re both good blenders.
I have another excellent video that goes other the specific pros and cons of each of them.
so be sure top check my other videos.
I compared these two blenders if you’re interested in purchasing a blender.
And I have other videos that talk more about the Omega Food Pro food processor.
So hopefully you now know the difference between the food processor and the blender.
Once again, the blenders are simply for blending primarily liquids, although it will do other
things, and the food processor is for primarily working for dry ingredients although it will
work with some liquid ingredient, but not as well.
So don’t’ compromise.
Just end up getting a food processor and a blender, because they both do different jobs,
and once again, like my grandfather said, get the right tool for the right job.
Once again this is John Kohler with DiscountJuicers.com.
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