Cuisinart Blender For Shakes & Smoothies, CBT-2000

This blender is amazing, I absolutely love it! I do believe it is the best and most powerful blender I’ve ever owned.

I’ve been using this thing for 5 weeks and have a lot of praise for it.

I like to make a 930 kcal smoothie nearly every day (nuts/greek yogurt/milk/frozen fruit/veggies/protein powder) which is 1.2L by volume. For the last two years I had been using two cheap blenders (both had small bases, one had a switch that set the blender into on/off/turbo and the other had a bunch of buttons in a row that adjusted speed) that were filled to capacity whenever I made this smoothie and both had a lot of trouble chopping up the frozen fruit. Every time I made this smoothie recipe I would have a lot of trouble blending the nuts/berries into a fine consistency (there would always be lots of bits floating around) and it took long to do. I would spend 5 minutes or more following a procedure I designed after lots of experimentation where I would add ingredients in a certain order, blend in certain patterns, pause to remove air bubbles after adding the spinach etc.

With this blender I just throw everything inside, hit two buttons (smoothie -> start) and it gives me a perfectly smooth meal in 45 seconds. That’s kind of incredible. When I was first looking at this blender and trying to find information about it there was hardly anything out there, so this review’s going to be all over the place but hopefully it answers some questions people might have.

JAR/BLADES
It’s sturdy and fits a *lot* of fluid. If you suspect this blender is oversized for you it’s likely not. This machine has a nice sweet spot (aesthetically, lol) when filled around halfway but less or more will work perfectly fine as I’ve discovered. The blades at the bottom of the jar are not very sharp and you can go in there to clean with a scrubber or paper towel and not get cut. The bluntness is not a problem at all when it comes to blending. I honestly think the ninja brand blenders where the blades are stacked is a horribly stupid design that’s not safe, efficient, or useful. I would prefer fewer faster blades rather than many slower spinning ones. You don’t need sharp blades or many of them when they are spinning at 10,000 RPM because the sheer force of impact is going to rip stuff apart – and it does, which I will talk about later.

The seal at the bottom of the jar is very tight, there is no sign of leakage at all despite daily usage.
The inside of the jar has gotten scratched up a lot with use; in fact it looks almost cracked on one corner but isn’t.. so it seems to be holding up okay.
Overall well designed, tough plastic.

Fitting the jar into the base of the blender is not difficult. If the gear isn’t aligned just keep trying to sit the jar down while wiggling it a little bit. Easy.

LID
The lid has three rubber gaskets on it which secures it really well against the top of the jar. One review says it’s too tight. I say it’s perfect. With a lot of liquids in the jar, immediately spinning up the blender up at 5 speed sends splashes up and if the lid isn’t fully secured on the jar it can get knocked off the blender and make a mess. Really the lid is tight to make sure liquid doesn’t splash out of the blender.

The middle of the lid has a removable plastic cap so you can pour in ingredients without removing the whole lid. This is very well designed – pressure vents are on four sides of the circle (otherwise you might have the cap popping off, which the top reviewer overlooked). On a cleaning cycle with soap and water you can make a lot of bubbles which can overflow the jar. The benefit to having vents on the side of the round lid cap is that the pressure can escape and the soapy bubbles can climb out of the sides of the cap but not off the cap since there’s a trench around the cap on top of the lid. It’s a good and very thoughtful design touch that I think has been overlooked by every reviewer so far.

BASE
There are a few presets this blender has. Smoothie works well for smoothie. Soup works well for soup – tried it once for tomato basil and surprisingly it makes a hot very smooth soup. Never trying it again because I’m afraid to wear this thing out.
The speed adjustment is a very nice thing to have and is the only reason I got this blender in the first place.
The rubber thing that the jar sits atop of is not very flexible.

The base overall feels pretty sturdy and its smooth shell is easy to clean. The rubber feet on the bottom are really good at stopping the blender from sliding around, at least on my smooth table surface.

BLENDING
If you are blending manually and adjusting the speed dial one of the things you will notice is that the speed changes aren’t instant. For example if you set the speed to 1 and start blending it will take a second for the blender to ramp up, but afterwards it switches to faster speeds pretty quickly. Dropping speeds using the dial however is not instantaneous… it’s a weird behavior. For example, spin it at 7 and turn the dial slowly to 6..5..4..3.. and you will notice that instead of dropping speed to 6, then 5, then 4, the blender ignores you and will just spin at 7 for a couple seconds and then suddenly drop speed to 3. This doesn’t really make any difference but has me curious as to what the speed dial is actually doing. The turbo mode though does engage instantly. It scares me.

One thing I noticed is that if you are blending something (like a smoothie for instance) and then drop spinach/kale leaves inside, the blender and jar starts to shake and vibrate pretty hard as its processing the soft veggie leaves. This really doesn’t matter for anything either since it’s never ever going to fall over or move around on the table but is funny to see. Keeps me entertained.

This blender is very good at creating a vortex inside the jar. Seriously, impressively good. You won’t need a temper for anything remotely soft. Maybe for nut butters, but I haven’t tried. In my personal experience with smoothies I can see the liquid being shuttled around the jar in four mini vortexes around the jar (if this makes any sense), and everything has a chance to touch the blades. Stuff sticks to the wall much less than in the cheap blenders I previously had. I know that is a very abstract description but I think whichever team designed the jar and blades did their due diligence.

Bubbles are few and far between and can be shaken out.

Fineness of smoothies in this blender are incredible. It chops up berries, seeds into nothing, nuts into nothing, veggies into nothing, all super consistent – if you don’t want solid bits left in your smoothies then you wont have them.

NOISE
This blender is really noisy at higher speeds. It can get much louder than the two cheap blenders I have previously used, but then again it is much more powerful. At the same power though I suspect this cuisinart blender is much quieter than the cheap ones I had, but I know that doesn’t mean a whole lot to anyone reading.
At low speeds the motor hums along at a low frequency and very low volume and the ingredients smacking around in the jar make most of the noise but at high speeds this blender gets fairly high pitched and makes a *lot* of noise. Especially in the soup preset – this thing is nearly unbearable for 7 minutes. Earplugs.

The jar lid also really helps with noise, I’d say cutting it down by at least 2x. I would recommend using the lid always.

CLEANUP
Very easy to just rinse the lid and jar under water to get everything off. ( IF you do it right after use, don’t let stuff get crusty)
Probably only need to use water & soap and run the ‘clean’ preset once in a while if you are good about rising immediately after use.
I noticed that smells can stick around for a while (basil tomato soup smell stayed for a week after making. pink peppercorn smell stayed for a week. raw egg/honey/milk recipe always stays for a day or two) even if running the cleaning preset with soapy water though.

If you make food with strong smells in this blender I suspect the scent will linger inside the jar unless you clean some other way than using the preset on the blender. Does it matter? not to me really.

OTHER NOTES
I’m impressed with how well this functions (for 300$ it better, right?) and the build quality is excellent. Power cord in the back is low gauge and nice. Does take a couple seconds to wake up from sleep (wake it up by pressing a button or turning the knob).
The display is nice and bright and has pretty good resolution to tell you what’s going on. I honestly thought this was unnecessary but after getting used to it the layout of the screen makes sense and I don’t mind it.

The top review complains there is no ‘cancel function’ button. The big button on the left is the ” START / STOP ” button, not so hard.

i believe this is the cheapest “pro” level blender you can get. i’ve had ~$200 blenders that don’t even come close to the smoothness this machine can make.

This is an excellent blender, obviously sturdy and well-made. My last blender was a Ninja SS351 Foodi Power Blender & Processor System 1400 WP, which fell apart within 6 months; the front power button literally popped off with a little part inside broken. That Ninja blender cost around $200, so I was seriously upset about it. Even when that Ninja blender worked, it didn’t work well. I make a lot of smoothies and the Ninja made smoothies that were more like ‘chunkies’. This Cuisinart works beautifully, however, making smoothies ultra-smooth quickly. Even when I use strawberries with hulls, other frozen fruits, spinach, and ice the smoothies are rendered totally smooth and frosty in seconds with this Cuisinart blender. Its 3.5 hp motor doesn’t strain or slow no matter what I throw in it. Cleaning it is a breeze, as it cleans like a Vitamix, simply add water and a drop of dish soap and let it run on the clean cycle. It’s pretty loud, but not insanely so. I bought this after reading several comparative reviews about blenders and this one consistently was at the top of the list. I am very pleased with it.

Very hard to find a US spec blender that isn’t hideous. This one has a very good motor and will blitz pretty much anything. Not too noisy. But why can’t they build an attractive-looking machine ? I would have bought the Vitamix, but they are even uglier. Recommended if you don’t care too much about the clunky and dated look of the thing. Looks like it was designed in 1970.