Instant Pot, the darling multi-purpose electronic pressure cooker of the home chef set, has a new sibling designed to simplify your culinary life: A blender that also cooks.
The Instant Pot Ace Multi-Use Cooking and Beverage Blender, available exclusively at Walmart for $99, promises the ability to both cook and pulverize food into soups, juices, purees and the like.
This allows one-pitcher preparation of recipes that involve both cooking and blending, a combination of tasks which traditionally requires using at least two kitchen appliances (e.g. an Instant Pot and a conventional or immersion blender), and/or a lot of bowls and pots. (In other words, fewer things to wash.) Think VitaMix with a heating element, or a ThermoMix (which does even more but costs upward of $1,400 and is huge).
The Instant Pot Ace Blender offers four pre-set conventional blending programs (smoothies, ice cream, nut/oat milk, and crushed ice) and four hot blending programs (puree, soup, soy milk, and rice milk), along with three manual blending speeds. Instant Brands, the company that created the Instant Pot, says the blender is based on some of the same microprocessor technology used in its popular electronic pressure cookers.
The Instant Pot Ace Blender’s 60-ounce glass pitcher holds a concealed heating element; Instant Brands says the glass can withstand extreme temperature changes. A 23,000-rpm motor powers the Ace’s eight metal blades. By way of comparison, the VitaMix 5200’s 3-inch blade spins at 28,500 rpm, while the less expensive VitaMix 7500’s 4-inch blade spins at 22,700 rpm.
When the blender is using a heat setting, its display (which is very reminiscent of a typical Instant Pot display) shows the current cooking temperature in either Fahrenheit or Celcius. Instant Brands says the blender consumes 700 watts of power when blending and 600 watts for heating.
The Instant Pot Ace blender comes with several accessories: A food tamper for pushing oversize chunks onto the blades, a 5-ounce (150 ml) plastic measuring cup, a brush with bristles to clean the blender’s blades and other inaccessible areas, and a cloth bag with drawstrings for straining or filtering food — say, for example, to make soy or rice milk smoother. Instant Brands says the strainer bag is lint-free and machine washable.
