Optimum 9200A Blender Review: A New Beast In My Kitchen

Power blenders are marvellous things. You can pulverise just about anything in them. It goes without saying that one of these is an incredibly useful piece of kit to have in the kitchen. Here’s a review of the Optimum 9200A Next Generation high speed blender.

Yes, a new and powerful beast has taken up residence in my kitchen. It has such a commanding presence that I can’t help but use it again and again. What, you may well ask, is she wittering on about now? I have a new blender, a Froothie Optimum 9200A Next Generation to be precise.

Finely grinding many foods, especially fruit, vegetables and nuts enables the body to more easily absorb any available nutrients. Whilst my old blender was useful for making basic smoothies, it wasn’t very efficient at grinding up anything course.

This meant, when making smoothies with goji berries for instance, I’d end up with a reddish bitty sludge at the bottom of the jug that wasn’t desperately appealing. I was also unable to make ‘green’ smoothies. I tried with some of our home grown kale once and it was just not meant to be. We found coconut water with large pieces of kale floating about in it was rather hard to drink.

Optimum 9200A Power Blender

The Optimum 9200A Next Generation*, on the other hand, is a high speed super blender with a 2,611 watts motor and a scary top speed of 44,000 revolutions per minute (RPM). The jug which is made of ultra strong, heat-resistant polycarbonate has a 2 litre capacity and can take both wet and dry ingredients. The blades are stainless steel and very sharp.

It has automatic blending options, which means I no longer have to hover over my morning smoothie when I have so many other things I need to do. I can set it to low, medium or high speed and it also includes a pulse function. It can blend pretty much anything. I’ve used it to make smoothies, nut butters, ice-cream and even soup. It even crushes ice.

Handily, the jug has measures, for cups, fluid ounces and litres, so can cope with pretty much any measurement you care to throw into it. I have the rather smart black model as shown above, but white, red and silver models are also available.

Smoothies

In the West’s recent drive to embrace a healthier lifestyle, the smoothie has really come into its own. Smoothies are nothing new, they made a regular appearance on our breakfast or lunchtime table when I was growing up. However, they were fairly simple, usually consisting of milk, wheatgerm and banana.

Now, not only do we have a wealth of additional ingredients available, but blenders are far more powerful. With a good power blender, you can add pretty much any sort of fruit or vegetable you like.

I’ve made beautifully smooth drinks with raw beetroot, carrot, kale, celery, cucumber, spinach and garden weeds, including nettles. This new power blender of mine whizzes frozen berries, apples with their skins on and all sorts of other tough stuff.

Other Optimum 9200A Blender Recipes

I don’t only use my power blender for smoothies, however, oh no. Sauces, pestos, spreads and cauliflower rice are regularly whizzed up. I’ve even made my first ever bean to bar chocolate in it too. You can see some of the recipes I’ve created with it on my blender page.

Optimum 9200A: How Did I Find It?

I’ve put it through its paces a few times and conducted a number of tests, all of which it passed with flying colours. When I made a raw chocolate and goji berry smoothie, it was impossible to detect even a tiny bit of goji berry.

Our kale blended to a fine green juice and a couple of other ingredients I wasn’t sure about had similarly successful results. I will be posting some of the things I’ve made in due course. This raw cashew chocolate spread, for instance, is a good example of grinding nuts into a super smooth paste.

I do have a couple of quibbles, but all in all, I’m delighted with my new resident beast.

The quibbles are on the cleaning front. I’d heard that it was a synch to clean. Apparently all I needed to do was to put some water in the jug with a dash of washing up liquid and blend. This works to a point, but of course doesn’t clean the top or lip of the jug.

Whereas I used to just dunk my old blender in the washing up bowl along with everything else, it is not a good idea to get the bottom of this jug wet. So cleaning the jug overall is a little awkward. I must stress, this hasn’t put me off using it. I am super excited about its capabilities and will continue to use it on a regular basis.

Goji Berries Blitzed

Goji berries are one of the “super foods” I try to eat on a regular basis. However, they really didn’t work very well in a smoothie using our old blender which produced a not very appealing reddish sludge at the bottom of the jug.

So, the very first ingredient I put to the test in our Froothie blender was goji berries. We tend to add all sorts of things to our smoothies and a banana is not an uncommon ingredient, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible so that we could taste the goji berries and get a real chocolate hit.

It’s perhaps, no surprise to other Froothie Fanatics that this actually worked, but I was thrilled. In a matter of seconds, you could no longer detect any individual part of the goji berries – they blended perfectly.

The kefir raw cacao and goji berry smoothie was also quite delicious and worked as I’d hoped. It’s raw, healthy and energy boosting. You can find out more about kefir in this spiced kefir pancakes post. Better still, I have a whole post on how to make kefir and what to use it for.

Keep in Touch

Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you have an Optimum 9200A or any other power blender, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Have you any top tips? Do share photos on social media too and use the hashtag #tinandthyme, so I can spot them.

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If you’d like more equipment reviews, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All just as I find them, of course.

Choclette x

Froothie sent me an Optimum 9200A Next Generation blender to try out in my kitchen. I was not required to write a positive review and as always, all opinions are my own. Thank you for your support of the brands and organisations that help to keep Tin and Thyme blithe and blogging.