Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender

Introduction

Ninja made its first portable blender, the Blast, a year ago. It was a neat, take-anywhere device, but it had a few limitations that the new Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender largely fixes.

With this new model you can now leave the motor behind, making for a lighter experience if you just want to take your drink with you.

The updated Blast is also a lot more powerful, making it more of a general-purpose blender, rather than a device for smoothies only.

Design and Features

• The base contains a motor and a battery
• Clever integrated travel cup
• Three blending modes

Available in four colours (silver, lavender, navy and grey), the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender is the company’s high-end portable blender, designed to offer fewer compromises than other models.

Last year’s Blast was good, but once you’d made a drink, you had to carry the entire unit, battery and all with you. With the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender, the travel cup and base are separate.

The cup still contains the blades, which are fixed to the bottom, but they don’t weigh much and don’t make a difference when drinking from the top.

Ninja’s travel lid completely unscrews, so you can add ingredients; once attached, its clip-on lid proved to be leak-proof and the spout nice to drink from. As the flip-up lid is attached to the main lid, there’s no chance of losing it.

For those occasions where you might want to carry the entire unit around, such as for making a drink at work or while camping, the 1.3kg weight’s not too bad to carry around, and the slim unit fits in a bag easily enough.

I’d say the only slight step backward from the original Blast is that the new Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender uses a proprietary charge cable. Although the battery life is rated at up to 25 drinks, if you’ve gone mobile and run out of juice, there’s no quick way to top up the battery using a phone charger.

The flip side of that argument is that the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender can be used while charging, as a standard blender. That can be handy if you get the blender out and find it’s flat and don’t want to wait until the battery is ready to go.

Making drinks and more is easy. Ninja has a useful set of measurements on the side of the cup, so you can sort out ingredients without having to pre-measure anything. Although the cup is a 570ml one, it can take 490ml of ingredients maximum, giving space for agitation without spills. That’s still a decent size for any drink.

Once ingredients are in place and the cup is attached to the base, there are three modes to choose from.

Crush is for dealing with frozen drinks, including just ice and frozen fruits only. It runs using Ninja’s AutoIQ tech, and takes less than 60 seconds.

Smoothie is similar to the mode on the original, and is another AutoIQ mode that runs for less than 60 seconds. This is for recipes that contain a mix of fresh and frozen ingredients.

There’s also a manual 30-second blend mode for all other jobs.

That’s a lot more flexibility than the original device, which was really for smoothies only. Here, the option to deal with ice means that this is much more of a traditional blender, only much smaller and cordless.

Due to the small confines of the cup, it’s possible that the blender may struggle to get started with some ingredients. When this happened, I could pick up the blender and give it a little shake, as suggested by the sticker on the side, to help get it going.

At the end, when you’ve finished your drink, there are a few clean-up options. For quick cleaning, a drop of washing up liquid can be added to the cup along with warm water to the Min line. A couple of bursts on Blend mode, folllowed by a rinse of warm water should do the trick.

Hand washing is more complicated, as it’s hard to get to the bottom of the cup and clean the blades; you shouldn’t do this by hand, to avoid cutting yourself, and it’s tricky to get a washing up brush to the bottom.

Fortunately, the cup and blades are dishwasher safe (top shelf), which is a much easier way to clean them. The base should only be wiped down and should not be submerged in water.

Performance

• Excellent crushing power
• Fast
• Makes brilliant smoothies and more

As the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender is a lot more powerful than other cordless personal blenders that I’ve tested, I started it out with a tough test: crushing ice. Filling the cup with ice cubes, I hit the Crush button and let the device automatically go through its cycle, which consists of bursts of blending with pauses in the middle.

After less than a minute, I had a fine snow of crushed ice, at least as good as any that I’ve seen from any regular blender.

I then cleaned up and started fresh, and added a cup of diced pineapple. Using the Blend mode, I turned the pineapple into a fine puree that would be good for making cocktails; think about using peach, and you could make a fine peach Bellini with the puree.

I then made my standard smoothie: ice, pineapple, coconut milk, yoghurt, mint leaves and coconut flakes. With the Smoothie setting, the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender first of all struggled and its blades got stuck. A little shake of the ingredients, and under a minute later, I had a brilliant smoothie: no chunks of ice, and even the smaller ingredients were perfectly blended.

The only real downside is that the Ninja Blast Max Portable Blender is loud, and I measured it at 86.6dB.

Should you buy it?