Pulsating your Blends

Sometimes you just need a quick burst to pull down the ingredients or you just want to run the blender for a short amount of time. Pulsating your blends allows you to have total control over your blend.

Using the pulse feature is a quick and convenient way to make phenomenal recipes, and is great to put a light finish on thicker recipes. By using the pulse feature on your blender you can make Ice Creams, finish off smoothies, blend a quick salad dressing, sauce, or bean dip.

How to Dry Chop

Dry chopping can be used for adding small chunks of ingredients into a bowl or plate.  For example if you’re making a pasta recipe then chopping your meat, onions, and bell peppers in your Vitamix or Blendtec makes sense.

How to use the Pulse feature for dry chopping

Add in your vegetables you’d like to chop, make sure the container is dry, lightly tap the pulse button on the Blendtec blender or flip the pulse switch on the Vitamix blender to create a short blade burst. You’ll want to do a short burst several times until you get your desired consistency.

Blendtec and Vitamix both sell jars and containers with a wider base. we recommend the Low Profile Container or the Wildside Jar because it’s easier to scoop out the chopped ingredients out from under the blades.  A Spatula comes in handy for dry chopping and scrapping out what’s left in the jar.

How to Wet Chop

Fill the blender container with water (Usually 4 to 6 Cups), so when you add the ingredients they float on top of the water and do not have any contact with the blades.  When you press the Pulse feature the blades suck the ingredients right down the middle of the jar and shred them into tiny little pieces!  Chopped and ready.  This is great for salads, you can place red cabbage into the jar with a peeled orange, a cored apple, and some carrots, press the pulse feature a few times and before you know it, you have a healthy salad in a bowl.

Wet Chopping allows for quick salads and shreds the ingredients quickly, one thing to be careful not to do when wet chopping is to hold the pulse button to long cause then the ingredients will get liquified into the water and you will have a vegetable drink not a vegetable salad.

2 Types of uses for the pulse

Quick short bursts

Lightly tapping the pulse button on a Blendtec blender or pulse switch on the Vitamix blender will give you a quick short burst.  This type of pulsating works for dips and ice creams and finishing off thicker recipes or adding Oreos into a smoothie or maybe adding chicken into a tortilla soup.

Use the pulse for longer holds

Holding the pulse feature down will allow the ingredients to pull down and get liquified a little.  Longer pulsating holds are good for finishing off a recipe such as an ice cream or smoothie or if a sauce or dressing needs to be mixed a little more.

The pulse button or switch only runs when you are pressing it down when you let go the blades will stop.  The speed the blades travel when you hold down the pulse button on your Vitamix or Blendtec blenders are equivalent to speed 4 on the manual settings.

Vitamix vs Blendtec blade design differences

Blendtec blenders and Vitamix blenders are equipped with different styles of blades which affect the consistency of your salads when using the pulse feature. Blendtec blender jars come with 2 big fat dull stainless steel blades welded onto their jars which work very well for all Blendtec recipes but are thicker so they can’t chop your ingredients as fine as the Vitamix blades can.

Both the Blendtec Wildside Jar which comes standard on all Blendtec Designer blenders and the standard jar which is standard on the Blendtec classic series blenders have the same dull blade design. There are no sharp blade options for Blendtec blender models.

On the other hand Vitamix blenders have very sharp four blade design which proves to be a little more difficult to reach under to scoop out the ingredients that get stuck under the blades. The vegetables do get chopped to a finer consistency than the Blendtec but it can be harder to get out from the base of the Vitamix container.

Their newer Low Profile Container is wider at the bottom and the blades are slightly thicker than the other Vitamix containers so it’s a little easier to reach under and around the blades in their Low Pro Container.

In Conclusion,

The pulse features on the Blendtec blender models and the Vitamix blender models can be used for Wet Chopping and Dry Chopping but as we experimented with more and more recipes such as ice creams, dips, and sauces, batters, hot soups, we found that the pulse button can be used for much more than chopping.

If you are looking to finish off an ice cream and get that swirl shape to form at the top of the jar when you’re making ice cream blends, using your pulse feature is a great way to do it.  Hold the pulse button down and let the ingredients pull into the blades, you’ll have a lot more control over the blend by using the pulse feature.

Another good one is for dips, such as guacamole dip or hummus.  Using the pulse feature won’t over blend the recipe and you will get better results.

Both the Blendtec blenders and Vitamix blender are comparable, they have slight differences that set them apart but ultimately you can achieve similar results with either of these amazing machines. There is a pulse feature on almost all Vitamix and Blendtec models, do some more research and figure out which blender model is right for you. Thanks for reading.