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With their cool, pastel colours and curved, rounded frames, each one of Smeg’s small home appliances looks ls though it’s been time-warped straight out of the 1950s. Its BLF01 Blender is no exception, but this large, powerful device is anything but old-fashioned. With its 800W motor, large 1.5l jug and several different speeds and pre-set modes, the BLF01 is well-equipped to deal with almost any type of sauce, soup, dressing or smoothie you want blended or emulsified. It’s not suitable for blending hot food, but that’s more or less its only limitation, as it can blend dry ingredients without the need for extra water using its short pulse mode, and can crush ice as well with its special pre-set.
It’s a rather imposing device when you first get it out of the box, as its large, heavy base measures 197x163mm and weighs just over 3.5kg. Combined with its 1.5l jug, the whole blender stands at 397mm tall, which should fit easily in the gap between your worktop and your cabinets.
With a metre-long power cable, it’s relatively flexible, and it has a handy cord wrap built into the base, so it should also be easy to stow away and keep tidy if you’d rather keep it in a cupboard. This might be preferable if you find Smeg’s glossy, metallic branding a little too garish round the sides of the blender, but at least its central control dial help draws your attention away from it if you keep it tucked in between other appliances.
The BLF01 doesn’t come with many accessories, but its large capacity jug can hold a lot more ingredients than single-serving blenders such as the Nutribullet or Nutri Ninja. There’s also a removable lid and small measuring cup that fits into the centre of the lid, although with absolutely no kind of markings on it, it’s not really useful to measure things with. Instead, you’re more likely to be using it for feeding additional ingredients into the blender while its blades are spinning away.
It’s very easy to operate. The jug locks in on top of the motor and doesn’t require you to hold it down while it’s blending, and a red LED light will appear on the dial to indicate when it’s plugged in and receiving power. Its anti-slip feet stay firmly in place while you’re operating the blender and its safety lock mechanism will automatically shut the blender down if it overheats or you remove the jug.^ The BLF01 is controlled with its central dial, which has four different speed settings and two pre-set modes. The pulse button sits above it
Once your ingredients are in place, all you need to do then is simply select your chosen speed setting, which ranges from 1 to 4, and press the large start/stop button on the side of the dial. The dial also has two pre-set modes for smoothies and crushing ice, and these have their own timed programmes which will stop automatically, lasting for around 60 and 50 seconds respectively.
Smeg recommends using speeds 1-2 for recipes such as mousses, sorbets, batters, salad dressings and blended frozen drinks, and increasing the speed up to 3 or 4 for soups, whipped cream, milkshakes, smoothies, pesto and purées. The motor gets progressively louder as you move up through each setting, but the’re all pretty noisy, so don’t expect to carry on a conversation while you’re using it. The pulse button, meanwhile, can be used to briefly whizz up the motor to top speed for a couple of seconds, but cannot be used on speed setting 4 or with the two pre-set modes.
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The BLF01 comes with a handful of recipes in the instruction manual, but I tested it with our standard smoothie recipe, which consists of two handfuls of kale, a chopped banana and half a cup of mixed frozen berries plus water. I used the preset smoothie mode, which speeds up halfway through, and the results were excellent. There were still a few pithy bits of the fruit leftover, but the kale had been completely shredded and the whole recipe was very smooth and easy to drink.
However, I also blended the same recipe in the Nutribullet, our current blender of choice, and the results were largely the same. The Nutribullet had marginally more fruit pith present, but considering the Nutribullet is almost half the price of the Smeg BLF01 and only has a 600W motor, there wasn’t as big a difference as I’d hoped.^ There’s a hole in the middle of the lid to slot in the BLF01’s ‘measuring cup’, but its lack of markings aren’t very practical for actually measuring with
Of course, the BLF01’s appeal comes from its larger, more flexible blending jug, as the Nutribullet only has a maximum capacity of 600ml. This not only allows you to blend more than double the amount of ingredients in the Smeg, but it also means you can add a greater variety of ingredients to your mixture. The BLF01 is also easier to clean, as the convex design of its removable blade makes them easier to get at with a washing up brush compared with the concave housing present on the Nutribullet. The rest of BLF01’s components are all dish-washer friendly, alternatively you can use the self-clean option. This involves putting warm water and some detergent into the blender jug itself and using the pulse option on speed 1 around ten times to do the cleaning for you. Then it’s just a matter of rinsing and drying each individual component.
If you’re an avid cocktail drinker (or like to present seafood on ice beds, yes I’m reaching with that one), the BLF01’s crushed ice mode is also an attractive option. It can handle multiple ice cubes with ease, turning them into something resembling fluffy, compacted snow in under a minute. When I tried it out for myself, the results ended up sticking to the outside of the jug, but it all fell out very easily once I’d turned the jug upside down and tapped out the contents into a bowl.^ The BLF01 is certainly very effective at crushing ice
The Smeg BLF01 Blender is an extremely capable machine. Its spacious jug offers plenty of room for large quantities of ingredients and its various modes and options give you a lot of choice for blending different types of recipes. Its wide range of colours also make a refreshing change from the swathes of black and silver blenders you’ll also find in this price range.
However, at £130, it’s quite expensive, and you can find similarly-sized blenders for a lot less. Likewise, its size won’t suit everyone. For lone blenders, the Nutribullet is a much better buy, as it delivers nigh-on identical results for roughly half the price. The Nutribullet is also more suitable for taking the results on the go (the BLF01 doesn’t come with any additional carry cups, for example) and its bundled recipe books gives you plenty of ideas for new recipes. However, the Smeg looks a lot better in my opinion, and for those that need a large, all-purpose blender that can cope with meals for the whole family, the Smeg BLF01 is still a great, if slightly pricey, choice.
