Vitamix 5200 review

Popcorn ground into cornmeal with Vitamin 5200.

I have long lusted after a Vitamix blender because of the mystique surrounding the brand. It can make soup! It can grind anything!  It’s ridiculously expensive but worth it! And so on. Last year I finally bought one when there was a sale during Amazon Prime days. My choice was the Vitamix 5200, a no-nonsense model without a touchscreen, on the recommendation of this Serious Eats article.

My Vitamin 5200, scratches and all.

I didn’t fire up the Vitamix till a couple of months ago but have been using it regularly since then. And guess what? It’s a blender. Yes, it’s high powered, but other features make it only marginally better than my existing Waring Blade that currently retails for less than half the price of the Vitamix. (I have an older model but the features on the above seem similar.)

Blending? I enjoy a daily smoothie which includes peanut butter and frozen fruit, and both the Vitamix and the Blade do a good but not perfect job of blending everything to a thick liquid. Both generally leave a couple of big chunks intact. One time Trader Joe was out of the smooth peanut butter I love so I had to buy chunky. The Vitamix made the chunks completely disappear while the Blade left small (and unobjectionable) shards, so points to the Vitamix for its grinding ability.

Making soup? Here’s what the Vitamix will do, and the Blade will probably do as well: if you put 2 cups (no more than that) of viscous liquid in the blender and run it for 5 minutes on high (instructions somewhere say this won’t harm the blender but it’s an electric motor and that has to take a toll on its coils) the soup will get hot through friction. And that’s it. You could get the same results in a microwave, faster.

Popcorn ground into cornmeal with Waring Blade. Similar results to Vitamin, but with a lot of poweder.

Grinding solids? A pretty good cookbook came with the Vitamix and it includes a cornbread recipe where you grind popcorn into cornmeal. Both the Vitamix and the Blade did a credible job of producing uniformly slightly coarse cornmeal. The Blade did it faster but threw off a lot of powder which is wasteful and a cleanup issue. I’ll give the edge to Vitamix on this one.

Kneading bread? I followed the rather tricky instructions to knead a small loaf in the Vitamix and ended up with a sticky mess underneath dry ingredients. With time I could probably improve my technique and maybe even succeed in the final step, where you are supposed to pulse the kneaded ingredients for 2 seconds to make the dough rise off the blades so it comes out cleanly. (Note that this doesn’t really work in the video.) But since it’s easy enough to knead (a much larger amount of) dough by hand or in a Kitchenaid mixer if you get lazy, this isn’t something I’m going to continue to work on.

Self cleaning. This wouldn’t deserve a mention except that Amazon includes the phrase in its product name. All blenders are self cleaning: put a drop of detergent and a bit of liquid in the container, run it briefly, and it will dislodge much of the stuff on the bottom. But the Vitamix does seem to do a better job than the Blade which sometimes gets peanut butter stuck under its blades.

The Tamper. When I opened my Vitamix box I was surprised to discover a formidable black rod nestled inside the packaging. Vitamix calls this The Tamper and you can insert it through a hole in the top while the Vitamix is running to encourage ingredients to engage with the blades (it has a ridge that makes it stop just short of contacting the blades). To me this is a solution in search of a problem. Seems easier to do what most cooks would do instinctively: stop the machine briefly, open the top, and adjust the contents with a wet spatula. (That’s what the guy in the above video does.)

Vitamin 5200 Tamper

The user experience. Wondering if I had bought an expensive set of nonexistent emperor’s new clothes, I went on Facebook and signed up for several Vitamix groups. I wasn’t encouraged by what I found. Whereas the Instant Pot Community group (to give one example) has helpful newbie advice and good recipes, the Vitamix users seem mainly interested in add on products (you can buy a separate “dry” canister that goes with the “wet” canister that came with your blender, but as we saw with popcorn, the wet canister works fine for grinding) or how to keep your Vitamix looking new so you can display it on your countertop. That last made me crazy. Like any decent cook, I believe a beat up product is a good product because its wear is a sign of daily use.

Summing it up: I’m not sorry I bought my Vitamix 5200, but with its marginal benefits over other blending and mixing devices I probably wouldn’t buy it again.