Breville Fresh & Furious Review

The Breville Fresh and Furious is a convenient blender that stands out with its juicing cone and visible digital timer. The 50-ounce blender pitcher is on the slightly smaller side but still takes up the same amount of counter space as most blenders, with a blending capacity of 60 to 70 ounces. This blender works very well in specific scenarios, but falls short in others.

Smoothies

The Breville Fresh and Furious can whip up most smoothies in a quick 60 seconds with the smoothie setting, but some are better than others.

The Fresh and Furious creates a velvety textured green smoothie, complete with hearty greens like kale, blended with orange juice. It leaves a few small pieces of kale unblended, but the mixture flows nicely through a sieve, leaving only a small amount behind. The green smoothie made by the Fresh and Furious is one of the best we've tasted.

The fruit with oats and berry smoothies are both equally delicious, although the texture leaves a little to be desired. These smoothies have a pretty significant presence of noticeably intact berry seeds. Although, the oats and almonds blend right in with the rest of the fruit, producing a thick but not grainy smoothie. The straight berry smoothie also requires roughly 120 seconds of blend time to ensure the right viscosity, which is twice the time of the smoothie setting. The Oreo milkshake is a little runny, more closely resembling melted ice cream than a proper malt milkshake.

Pureeing

Unfortunately, the Fresh and Furious has a lot of room for improvement in its pureeing department.

While pureeing soups, the lid becomes pressurized and difficult to remove, and this blender cannot heat its contents, meaning you'll have to cook your soup over the stove. The nut butter takes a long time to get to a decently blended consistency and remains grainy regardless of how long you blend it. It also requires turning the concoction over while adding lots of oil to get to this subpar consistency. Overall, we would not recommend this blender for nut-fiends looking to make their own nut butters.

Frozen Drinks

The Fresh and Furious produces mostly uniform crushed ice and an almost Slurpee-like texture.

The crushed ice has a bit of a grainy texture to it. While the ice chunks are crushed into uniform pieces, visible crystals cover each piece like powdered snow. It also takes a full 60 seconds to crush the ice fully, which is on the longer side. The margarita leaves us with a similar feel. The Fresh and Furious efficiently blends ice, alcohol, lemonade, and strawberries in 60 seconds to make a delicious margarita. Still, the texture is slightly off, and it struggles to get started. The blender has to work very hard to begin the process, but calms down quickly for the remaining 52 seconds of its cycle. This blender also leaves some ice chunks in the margarita.

Controls

The Fresh and Furious is very easy to use. The interface and presets are intuitive. This blender has nine presets: auto clean, green smoothie, ice crush, smoothie, mix, chop, blend, puree, and liquify. These options are convenient and provide a good baseline.

Ease of Cleaning

The Fresh and Furious is very easy to clean, and we especially appreciate the effective cleaning preset. The lid, pitcher, and blades are dishwasher safe, and the shorter power cord prevents spills.

That said, the lid can be difficult to remove as the pitcher's contents become pressurized as they blend. At times, the lid becomes so pressurized that the contents explode out of the jar once you pry it off.

Should You Buy the Breville Fresh & Furious?

The Breville Fresh and Furious produces pretty amazing smoothies and okay margaritas, but falls short in most other categories. It is not the most expensive in our test suite, but it is far from the least, so if you plan to make anything other than smoothies, we recommend that you look at some of the other options we tested.

What Other Blenders Should You Consider?

The Fresh and Furious is easy to use with a clearly labeled interface, and nine presets. Unfortunately, it does not measure up to some of the other options in our test suite in pureeing and grinding.