This Oddly Satisfying Video Shows What Really Happens Inside Your Blender
Using a blender is a pretty self-explanatory process. Whether you're whipping up a fruit smoothie, making a protein shake, or pureeing a sauce, all you really have to do is toss your ingredients in, make sure they're not too big for a blender to handle, and add enough liquid to keep the blades turning. More importantly, however, don't ever forget to put the cover back on, unless you want to spend the rest of your day cleaning food off your ceiling.
While it's helpful to take a peek at the progress of your cookies in the oven, or your pasta boiling on the stove, it goes unsaid that you shouldn't do the same with a blender while it's at work. So what exactly goes on in there? One scene from "Nine Perfect Strangers," a TV show in which the characters are constantly drinking smoothies, gives us an inside glimpse (posted at Reddit). It's a pretty explosive process as soon as you click that blend button, and even in slow motion, the ingredients lose their integrity very quickly. The more the blades whip around, the more the colors intensify, and of course the more you watch, the more satisfying it gets.
Every smoothie exists because of physics
There's art involved, of course, but all forms of cooking come down to an exact science, and smoothies are no exception. According to How Stuff Works, a blender applies more principles of physics than you'd think, and there's a reason why it doesn't work the same way a food processor does. Along with the movement of the blades, it has a lot to do with the tornado-like shape of the blender.
The explosion of fruit that you see in the scene from "Nine Perfect Strangers" occurs because a vortex occurs as the blades turn faster and faster, causing a vacuum that pulls the ingredients toward the center of the blender and onto the blades. "The whirling motion and lack of space below the blades forces the liquefied strawberry up and out the sides," How Stuff Works explains. "This circular pattern continues, whipping air into the contents, which helps mix the ingredients more quickly, until you stop the blender." All this happens within a span of a couple of minutes, and the result is a perfectly combined mixture of ingredients. For as simple as blenders are to use, there's clearly a lot that goes into making a perfect smoothie or shake.