Why You Can Trust CNET Electrolux Masterpiece Blender ELJB74D9PS review: Electrolux's so called Masterpiece Blender still needs some work
The $350 Electrolux Masterpiece Blender doesn't perform well enough to earn its keep.
Since it costs $350, I expected a lot from the Electrolux Masterpiece Blender. It's not quite as pricey as the $530 Vitamix 7500 or the $450 Blendtec Wildside, but both of those back up their high end price with awesome performance. This Masterpiece Blender has the power to hold its own on the premium end with 1,200 watts. It has a sizable 74-ounce jar. It even sports an interesting design that looks great and supposedly lends itself to smoother blends.
Electrolux Masterpiece Blender ELJB74D9PS
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
It simply missed on too many tests for me to recommend it at its $350 price. It never missed badly. The Masterpiece Blender reached the finish line on all of our challenges, but it regularly left small chunks of unblended strawberry in our smoothies, and unmixed Parmesan along with pieces of walnut in the pesto. It made almond butter from whole almonds, but needed a long time and lots of help to do so. The Electrolux Masterpiece Blender is a fine machine, but for $350, it needs to be more than that.
Smooth operator -- testing the basics
You can purchase the $350 Electrolux Masterpiece Blender now from the company's site. It's not yet available in the UK, but Electrolux plans to begin selling it there in June. The US price converts to approximately £240. The Masterpiece Blender is available in Australia now for AU$430, also from the company's site.
The design looks the part of the premium price, and the tilted bottom intrigued me.
The bottom of the Electrolux Masterpiece Blender's 74-ounce blending jar is tilted. That's intentional. The PowerTilt Technology is the top feature listed on Electrolux's site for this machine. The site describes it as "a powerful new angle" that "intensifies taste by changing the way ingredients are blended -- making it simple to create the smoothest, most velvety textures."
As nonsensical as it is to suggest an angle, in and of itself, is powerful, I had reason enough to believe that the tilt might actually make a positive difference when blending smoothies. One of CNET's technical editors, Steve Conaway, tilts every blender he uses when mixing a drink to help the blades reach ingredients closer to the top of the container.
On top of that, the blender's six titanium-coated, copper-colored blades look well positioned to scoop the bottom and reach all the way to the sides. The blender also has a smoothie preset, in addition to ice crush, drink, and soup presets that go beyond simple speed settings. Similar to the Auto-IQ on the Nutri Ninja system, pressing the button runs a program of various speeds over the course of a minute or so.
The LED counts down the time remaining in your selected preset.
All told, I had plenty of reasons to expect, when I starting using the Electrolux Masterpiece Blender to make smoothies, that I'd get great results. But out of three batches, only one was perfect. We mix strawberries and OJ together for the sake of simplicity and repeatability on this test, and on two of the runs, I found a few chunks of strawberry leftover, even after using the machine's smoothie preset.
Both mixtures were drinkable, just not up to the level of its high end competition. Most premium blenders, and even some cheaper Hamilton Beach models, produce better smoothies in 15 pulses or less.
The titanium coated blades look great, but don't do anything special to help with the PowerTilt feature.
The PowerTilt feature looks cool in action -- at different speeds the center of the vortex forms in slightly different places in the jar, so the mixture does look like it's tilting. But the blades themselves don't actively tilt or change direction, neither does the jar, and the feature didn't produce the consistent results I was hoping for.
The ice test results were similar -- competent but underwhelming. No blender we've tested has ever failed the smoothie test. Plenty fall short when trying to blend 2 cups of ice without any water to help. The Electrolux passed easily. After the 50-second ice preset, the two cups of cubes were almost entirely made into snow. Again, though, on all three runs of the ice test, I found a couple of stray clumps, keeping the Masterpiece Blender agonizingly short of perfection.
Upping the ante -- pancake batter, whipped cream and cheese
Pancake batter illustrated why the blender fell short on the basics. That's why we run the test -- clumps of batter tend to stick in places where proper flow fails. I noticed a minor buildup on the ridge that protrudes into the jar near its handle, and batter stuck in the bottom corners. The ridge in particular might have been the culprit that trapped small pieces of strawberry or ice next to it and wouldn't let them cycle to the blades.
Electrolux passed the flip test when making whipped cream.
The whipped cream test showed what I expected it to -- the Masterpiece blender had plenty of power to turn cream, vanilla and sugar into a frothy mix. However, it was a little difficult to get all of the whipped cream out of the container. The jar is deep and the blades are close together. When blending, that's a good thing, but since neither the blades nor the bottom are removable, getting whipped cream from the far corners of the jar wasn't fun.
Washing it is easy enough, as it can blend hot liquids up to an impressive 194 degrees Fahrenheit according to the manual (90 degrees Celsius). So you can simply fill the container with warm water and a little soap and turn on the blender to clean it, then rinse it all off and it'll be ready for the next batch.
But it had trouble pulverizing a big block of cheese.
Handling the stress -- pesto and almond butter
I wasn't a fan of the blender's Boost button, which is essentially its pulse button. Most pulse buttons run their blenders on high speed, so you can press it for a second or two for bursts of power. You'll need to hold this boost button down for a couple of seconds just to get it up to speed, necessitating longer pulses.
Switching speeds is also sluggish with the Masterpiece. Go from speed three, the high speed, to speed one when blending and the blades barely turn. Give it a break for a second and then turn on speed one, and the blender enacts an effective low speed.
Pro: The cord winds neatly under the base to decrease clutter. Con: The boost button doesn't give the immediate power I'd want from a pulse.
The instruction manual actually recommends giving the Masterpiece blender breaks. After two minutes of tough blending, it asks you to give the blender five minutes off. It'll automatically stop itself after two minutes of run time to help enforce that practice. Five minute breaks would be pretty inconvenient if you're making blended drinks for a party, but I found them to be necessary to keep this blender acting powerfully.
Both on pesto and almond butter, pushing it further than that caused a noticeable dip in performance. The Masterpiece Blender still managed to complete both tests, though I found stray chunks of walnuts and unmixed Parmesan throughout the pesto.
The Masterpiece blender made pesto, but you can still see chunks of walnut that didn't get mixed in.
It needed a little more than 15 minutes of blending time to turn whole almonds into almond butter, as well as plenty of downtime throughout. I also had to help it with frequent stirring. Completing the task at all is a feat, but the best blenders can do it with less supervision in seven to ten minutes.
The Verdict
The biggest miss of the Electrolux Masterpiece Collection blender is the price. It's in a league where it can't compete well. The best models from Vitamix, Blendtec, and Ninja completed each of our tests faster, more thoroughly, and without needing regular breaks.
The Electrolux Masterpiece Blender looks the part of a high end small appliance, and it's mostly easy to use as well, but it performs more like a $100-$200 machine. If you find it at a discount, it's worth your consideration. Otherwise, I'd pass on this appealing but disappointing blender from Electrolux.