Breville Bluicer

The Breville 3x Bluicer Pro has a somewhat silly—but nonetheless accurate—name; it’s a combination of a blender and a juicer. It uses a single motorized base to power separate, interchangeable blender and juicer attachments. Breville says that the appliance can perform both functions with ease, churning out fresh juice that you can then blend into smoothies or frozen cocktails with the simple switch of an attachment. But at about $400, the Bluicer costs more than our winning centrifugal juicer (the Breville Juice Fountain Cold) and our winning midpriced blender (the Breville Fresh & Furious) combined. Intrigued, we tested it against both these winners in a Breville battle to see if it could truly replace both appliances. We also compared it with our winning high-end blender (the Vitamix 5200) as the ultimate test of performance. During testing, we evaluated the Bluicer’s ease of use and cleanup, juice and food quality, and overall performance.

Juicing with the Bluicer

When juicing, the Bluicer acts as a centrifugal juicer—it shreds produce into pulp and then relies on centrifugal force to fling the pulp against a filter basket to separate the juice from the solids. Cleverly, the blender jar doubles as a juice carafe. Like the Juice Fountain Cold, the Bluicer has a wide, 3-inch feed tube, which means that minimal food prep is required. We could insert multiple carrots or handfuls of kale in one go. We’ve found that centrifugal juicers aren’t very good at juicing kale (the lightweight leaves aren’t flung against the filter basket with sufficient force), and that was the case with the Bluicer. It did effectively juice both carrots and grapes, but the carrot juice was initially slightly foamier and the grape juice was a bit pulpier than the juices we made with our favorite centrifugal juicer. These differences were subtle, and both machines generally produced quality juice. And though all juicers are a bit of a pain to clean, both the Bluicer and the Juice Fountain Cold were relatively easy to clean and reassemble. 

Blending with the Bluicer 

When it came to blending, the Bluicer and our winning midpriced blender, the Fresh & Furious, performed almost identically. That’s because they’re almost identical in design. The bases of their jars are both fairly narrow (about 4.5 inches across), allowing them to create tight vortices and blend food effectively. The machines have similar presets, including “smoothie” and “frozen drink” buttons that make short work of frozen fruits, ice, and leafy kale alike. The Bluicer’s serrated blades were powerful enough to blend toasted almonds into almond butter, albeit with a coup... read more