I went on somewhat of a fruit buying spree this weekend. With 2lbs of organic strawberries for $5 at Safeway on Friday... and then 4lbs of strawberries for ~$8.5 at Costco.... then then grapes and blueberries besides, I decided to blend some of them to see how it would turn out. And with having gone to Jamba Juice twice in the last two weeks, it might actually save me some money.... maybe.
The original plan was, of course, to blend fresh fruits in the food processor. I started out with some fresh strawberries, and fresh blueberries... and then remembered that I had some frozen blueberries in the freezer from blueberry muffins last semester. I reserved half of the fresh blueberries to eat whole and added some greek yogurt and lemonade as a mixing medium. Also a spoonful of leftover vanilla ice cream as an afterthought.... and to get rid of the box.
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| Yes... the yogurt had blueberries in it too, but I didn't enjoy this particular yogurt on it's own.... what a way to get rid of ingredients! |
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| Just look at those delicious strawberries! |
What I learned: Food processors work better with dry foods. There are two functions on my processor (which is a Cusinart Mini), being CHOP and GRIND. I GRIND-ed my way until most, but not all of the chucks were gone. While it didn't come flying apart, there were definite leaks around the sides of the top and in the cap of the processor. Of course, that could also be that that would happen in blender cups too if the cup were not so tall, but the processor cup being some four-five inches tall, there was leakage. The result tasted great at least.... the half that I had left after being a klutz and knocking the cup over and spilling half of it all over the countertop. It was noticeably chunky though, as in there were small chunks of fruit, the size of which were maybe 1-2mm^2. Small enough to fit through the straw... big enough for definite texture.
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| Experiment 1. You can see the ice cream refused to incorporate.... and the small signs of leakage |
Experiment 2 was all frozen berries: frozen strawberries I found in the back of the freezer, frozen blueberries, then of course, yogurt and lemonade. There was less leakage in this experiment.... I had put in less mixing medium.... the result of which was slush that was frozen solid because I left it for a bit while I cleaned up everything else. After decanting it into a tall cup though, I blended it throughly with a stick blender and that got the bits smaller. it's still slush, so I won't be drinking it for awhile, but it's much less chunky than the first experiment. The reason I couldn't use the stick blender in the first place was because when using that kind of blender in a cup, and approaching from the top, there needs to be much more mixing medium.... getting it to slush first in the processor helped eliminate the need.
Will I do it again? Probably not.... but it was fun. And yummy.
