Breville the Fresh & Furious Blender Review

The Βreville Fresh & Furious Blender is tall, but its motor base isn't too bulky or heavy. You can store it on a counter or in a kitchen cupboard, and you can remove the jar for easier storage.

The Βreville Fresh & Furious Blender has a good build quality. The jar is made of plastic that feels premium, and its lid fits securely. Its gear is made of metal alloy and feels solid, but unfortunately, the motor base and motor base gear assembly are made of plastic. The power cord comes out of the front of the blender when it's fully extended, which is unusual and a bit awkward. There's a screen on the motor base that displays a digital timer counting down when you run a preset mode and a stopwatch when you're blending using one of the speed settings. Unfortunately, the control panel feels flimsy, and the touch-sensitive controls don't provide clicky feedback. Also, the bottom of the base only has two suction cups to help it stay in place, while most blenders that have them have one in each corner. They also don't do a great job of creating suction and may cause the blender to move around during blending. If you're blending at high speeds or processing tough ingredients like ice cubes, you may need to put your hand on the blender to keep it steady.

The main jar has a 50oz capacity, so it's somewhat small for a full-size blender, like the Vitamix Explorian E310 or the KitchenAid K150.

The Breville Fresh and Furious is made of plastic and can go in the dishwasher, along with the non-removable blade assembly.

The Βreville Fresh & Furious blender has five sharp blades. The manufacturer advertises the pair at the bottom to help prevent food from getting stuck at the bottom of the jar, while the vertical serrated blades are meant to help cut and grind ingredients.

There's a 2-part lid for the main jar. There's a rubber seal with ridges that help it stay in place with friction, plus two tabs that clip around the sides of the jar to keep it secure. The clear centerpiece is removable, and you can use it as a two-ounce measuring cup. There's also a loop on the lid that you can pull when you want to remove the lid.

The power cord is quite long and comes out of the front of the blender when it's fully extended, which is unusual. There's a place to wrap it under the motor base when it's not in use.

• Breville Fresh and Furious motor base
• 2-part lid
• 50oz (1.5L) Round BPA Free Tritan Jug main jar
• Fresh and Furious Instruction Book
• Recipe Pamphlets

It's fantastic for small batches of fibrous ingredients. If you make something like a single-serve smoothie with kale, it quickly blends the ingredients and makes a virtually perfectly smooth puree. However, blenders with the best performance for small batches, like the KitchenAid K400, produce the same result even faster. You might find a blender with personal jars, like the Ninja Detect Duo Power Blender Pro, more convenient for blending small batches.

The Breville Fresh and Furious is incredible for blending fibrous ingredients at full capacity. If you make multiple servings of smoothie or a batch of pureed soup, it easily blends fibrous ingredients like leafy greens or broccoli without leaving any grains left over. You need to run a couple of one-minute blending cycles, so the only downside is that some blenders, like the Vitamix 5200, can produce an equally smooth blend in less time.

It's excellent for crushing ice. The 'ice crush' program is an automatic pulse mode, so you don't need to constantly press a button or flip a switch. However, because it has a somewhat small jar, it's better to work with around six ice cubes at once. It makes snow-like crushed ice, but if you need a lot of ice, it's not ideal because you need to work in batches.

It produces superb, smooth nut butter without a huge amount of time or effort on your part. Since it doesn't come with a tamper, you need to shake the jar a bit, especially at the beginning, and remove the lid to stir the mixture partway through. It makes it harder to use than the Breville The Q, but it does an excellent job with recipes like nut butter.

It's not particularly loud for a full-size blender, so it's not annoying if you need to blend for a few minutes.

The Breville Fresh & Furious blender has a wide range of speed settings, so it's possible to start at a lower speed when blending thick recipes or to avoid over-blending.

It has buttons for three blending programs that automatically vary the speed and length of the blend. There are presets for 'Green Smoothie', 'Auto-pulse/Ice Crush', and 'Smoothie'. The 'Green Smoothie' mode is intended for recipes with leafy greens and seeds, while the 'Smoothie' mode is for combining frozen and liquid ingredients. With Auto-Pulse, the blender pulses constantly without you needing to hold down the button. The LED display shows a timer counting down from 60 seconds when you use the 'Smoothie' or 'Green Smoothie' preset mode. There are also buttons for five speed settings: 'Mix', 'Chop', 'Βlend', 'Puree', and 'Liquify'. When you use one of these settings, the LED display shows a stopwatch that counts up to 60 seconds before the blender stops automatically. Finally, there's an 'Auto-Clean' mode for cleaning the jar when you're done blending.

It's very easy to clean by hand. Running the blender with soap and water in the jar effectively cleans the inside of the jar and the blades. There's an auto-clean blending program to use for that purpose, although you can also just run it manually for about a minute. Afterward, the 2-part lid is the most time-consuming part to clean since you need to remove the gasket and scrub both parts of the lid with a brush. Still, it's a simple process overall.