Instant Pot Ace Nova Cooking Blender Review

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender is man­u­fac­tured by the Cana­di­an Instant Com­pa­ny, famous for its Instant Pot Cook­ers. The blender was first released in 2018 and quick­ly became very pop­u­lar with con­sumers. No won­der, it is a glass jar blender with a cook­ing ele­ment and offered at an afford­able price. Besides, it is a very ver­sa­tile machine.

Stay with us here; we will close­ly exam­ine this blender and ana­lyze how effi­cient­ly it per­forms all the claimed tasks and is worth fussy-type cus­tomers’ attention.

Dis­clo­sure: As an Ama­zon Asso­ciate, we may earn an affil­i­ate com­mis­sion for pur­chas­es you make when using the links on this page.

Read More: Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender Review

Functionality and Versatility 

Smooth­ie: The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender will make excel­lent drinks from soft and tough ingre­di­ents. It can also pro­duce decent qual­i­ty green smooth­ies even from tough food. The gad­get will pul­ver­ize well nuts, oats, chia seeds, and oth­ers in drinks, includ­ing usu­al sus­pects such as straw­ber­ry and rasp­ber­ry seeds. But to achieve the smooth con­sis­ten­cy of drinks, it may take up to 2 smooth­ies’ cycles to process. You can use Smooth­ie pre-set pro­gram and man­u­al blend­ing func­tion for smooth­ies blending.

Juices: The Instant Pot Ace Nova can­not pro­duce clas­sic juice that sep­a­rates the fiber from a liq­uid. How­ev­er, it can emul­si­fy fair­ly smooth drinks, aka “whole juice.”

Crush Ice: The Blender has a Crushed Ice pre-set pro­gram, so it is designed to process frozen ingre­di­ents and ice cubes in drinks. It will shave ice to the per­fect snow-like con­sis­ten­cy, but it is able to process good qual­i­ty mar­gar­i­tas and oth­er types of your favorite slushes.

Frozen Desserts: It is able to process decent qual­i­ty frozen desserts and frozen yogurt recipes using the Frozen Desserts pre-set (lasts 1:42 min).

Nut milk: This machine can eas­i­ly replace a few nut milk-mak­ing gad­gets. It is designed for pro­cess­ing excel­lent qual­i­ty oat/nut milk using the Nut/Oat Milk cold blend­ing pre-set pro­gram rice and soy milk using the hot Rice Milk and Soy Milk pre-sets. The Blender also comes with a nut bag to strain the fiber from the mix­ture for the per­fect nut milk results.

Tofu: Using the Soy Milk pre-set, the machine is more than capa­ble of mak­ing per­fect qual­i­ty Tofu.

Puree­ing: The gad­get has enough pow­er to puree raw and cooked veg­gies to make var­i­ous recipes, from the mashed pota­to to the most deli­cious spreads and dips. For cold puree­ing tasks, you can use the man­u­al Blend set­ting. How­ev­er, for recipes that require hot ingre­di­ents pro­cess­ing, you can use the hot blend­ing Puree pro­gram with two (2) options for pro­cess­ing soft (spinach, toma­toes, or apples) and hard (chick­peas, car­rots, or broc­coli) veg­eta­bles and fruits.

Soup: This Blender is designed to han­dle hot liq­uids. It has a hot blend­ing Soup pre-set pro­gram with two (2) options to process chunky and creamy recipes and heat­ing ingre­di­ents using heat­ing ele­ments up to the 212F (100 C) and blend­ing at the var­i­ous speeds for 12 min or 13:46 min (depend­ing on if you select a chunk of the creamy option) min­utes set­ting + time while it heats the plate until 212 F degrees.

How­ev­er, it would be best to remem­ber not to use frozen ingre­di­ents for soup as it will burn, dairy that you can add after it is ready, or very smelly spices. You also have to chop all ingre­di­ents into small pieces before plac­ing them in the jar since large chunks of pump­kin will not be cooked appro­pri­ate­ly dur­ing the set Soup pre-set.

Chopping/food prep: This machine has a good range of speeds (1–10 speeds) and pulse func­tions. So it is per­fect­ly able to per­form a range of food prep tasks from chop­ping veg­gies for coleslaw to mak­ing a sal­ad dress­ing, sal­sa, and mari­nades using man­u­al Blend pre-set. It is also will chop nuts and grate cheese. 

Dry grinding/milling:  This machine is designed for grind­ing nuts, seeds, crack­ers, and dry fruits; it can also make bread­crumbs from cook­ies, dry bread, and cere­al. The Blender can also mill the qual­i­ty flour from wheat, rice, corn, oats, etc. For a dry grinding/milling job, you usu­al­ly have to use a man­u­al Blend setting.

Baby Food: The Blender is per­fect for mak­ing cold or hot baby food recipes; you can use pre-set puree pro­grams or man­u­al Blend set­tings for this purpose.

Nut but­ter: The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender has enough pow­er to make a decent qual­i­ty nut but­ter only with some oil or water added. It is also equipped with a tam­per, the nec­es­sary tool for such chal­leng­ing tasks as pro­cess­ing thick mix­tures. How­ev­er, you should not process a thick mix­ture in the Blender for longer than 1 minute of con­tin­u­ous blend­ing; you blend, stop, scratch the walls, and blend again.

The Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender is very ver­sa­tile. It is equipped with enough pow­er, pre-set options, and a range of speed to per­form even a large vari­ety of tasks. How­ev­er, as with any mul­ti­task­ing machine, it requires time and effort to mas­ter all these functions.

Base Unit and Motor Power

This machine comes with a pow­er­ful 1000 Watts blender and 800 Watts heater motor that rotates blades at the speed of 25,000 RPMs. The base unit also has an air vent to cool the motor and non-slip rub­ber foot­pads. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the unit base has a rub­ber­ized plas­tic gears sock­et, so it has a short ser­vice life and could melt if not used carefully.

In addi­tion, the unit also has an inbuilt over­heat pro­tec­tion sys­tem that auto­mat­i­cal­ly shuts off the machine when the machine is overheated.

Settings and Programs 

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender con­trol pan­el is very elab­o­rate to oper­ate; it has many but­tons and func­tions and requires some learn­ing to mas­ter it. Essen­tial­ly, it comes with a dig­i­tal LED dis­play, 9 pre-pro­grammed set­tings, ((+) and (-)) but­tons, Start/Pause, Can­cel con­trols, Pulse func­tion, man­u­al Keep Warm and Blend pro­gram­ma­ble set­tings.

• The dig­i­tal LED dis­play is also very busy; it has a tem­per­a­ture icon in ºF / ºC, a speed bar (1–10 speeds), time counter which counts down when you use one of the 8 pre-pro­grammed set­tings and counts up when you use Man­u­al Blend or Keep Warm pro­gram­ma­ble func­tions. The LED dis­play indi­cates the stand­by mode if the blender is plugged in but not in use. When you use one of the hot blend­ings pre-sets, the LED dis­play shows an illu­mi­nat­ed lit­tle flame icon.
• Nine (9) pre-pro­grammed set­tings include four (4) Cold Blend­ing Pro­grams: Smooth­ies (1:30 min), Crushed Ice (0:44 min), Frozen Desserts (1:42 min), and Nut/Oat Milk(4:45 min), four (4) Hot Blend­ing Pro­grams: Purée, Soy Milk (25:14 min), Rice Milk and Soup, and pre-set Clean pro­gram for easy clean­ing the jar. Purée, Rice milk, and Soup pre-sets have 2 set­tings options each. Hot Soup set­ting has a chunk (12:00 min) and creamy (13:46 min) options, the Puree pre-set comes with soft (0:16 min) or hard ingre­di­ents (3:52 min) options, while Rice Milk has options for white (7:49 min) and brown rice (17:49 min) milk. All the pre-set pro­grams are acti­vat­ed by press­ing the appro­pri­ate pro­gram and then press­ing the Start/Pause but­ton. The pro­gram will run pre-set time on dif­fer­ent speeds, pulse bursts, and stops and auto­mat­i­cal­ly shut off at the end of the cycle, the LED dis­play will show the mes­sage END.
• Two (+) and (-) but­tons are designed for select­ing blend­ing speed, time for man­u­al Blend, Keep Warm pre-sets, and Pulse
• The Can­cel but­ton is designed to stop the pre-set pro­gram at any time and return it into stand­by mode. Like­wise, the Start/Pause will pause the pre-set pro­gram any time (LED dis­play will show — P — mes­sage) and resume it again from where it was paused when you press it again. The Start/Pause but­ton also selects between Fahren­heit (°F) and Cel­sius (°C) options if you keep push­ing it for 5 seconds.
• The Pulse func­tion is acti­vat­ed only in con­junc­tion with any of the 10 speeds avail­able. There­fore, you first select the Pulse set­ting, then select the speed with (+) and (-) but­tons, and then press the Start/Pause for activation.
• Man­ual Keep Warm pro­gram­ma­ble set­ting with the help of (+) and (-) but­tons allows adjust­ing the time for keep­ing your jar con­tent warm (40ºF-180ºF/60ºC –80ºC) from 30 min to 2 hours time.
• The man­u­al Blend set­ting allows the user to select a speed from 1 to 10 man­u­al­ly and run it up to 5 min­utes. To start man­u­al blend­ing, the user press­es the Blend but­ton, with (+) and (-) but­tons, selects the need­ed speed, and push­es Start/Stop; the blender will start run­ning gen­tly with increas­ing speed grad­u­al­ly until you press the Can­cel button.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender does not allow you to select cus­tom tem­per­a­ture set­tings, so it reduces its func­tion­al­i­ty a bit.

Container

Con­tain­er: This machine comes with a 56 Oz (1600 ml) heat-resis­tant borosil­i­cate glass Con­tain­er with bot­tom stain­less steel inter­nal base, so the blend­ed food does not come in con­tact with any plas­tic or rub­ber dur­ing blend­ing. It feels thick, sol­id, and heavy. The pitch­er also fea­tures a brace catch at the rim for fit­ting the blender lid securely.

The con­tain­er has very clear ounces, ml, and cup mea­sur­ing marks and a max­i­mum line of 56 oz. for cold ingre­di­ents and 48 oz. for hot ingre­di­ents. The min­i­mum liq­uid ingre­di­ents it can han­dle is about 1/4 cup / 2 oz. / 60 ml. And the max­i­mum dry con­tent the pitch­er can process is 32 oz. /1000ml.

Besides, the jar has a heat­ing ele­ment con­cealed at the bot­tom of the jar that adds to its heavy­weight. Final­ly, it should be men­tioned the pitch­er weighs just near­ly 6 pounds and could be heavy to lift.

Lid: The blender set includes a rub­ber BPA/P­FOA/PTFE-free Lid with a sil­i­con seal, lid brace catch, and safe­ty lid lock. The lid and lock cap are well-made and secure­ly sit on the jar dur­ing blending.

Tam­per: This machine is equipped with a plas­tic 3‑in‑1 tam­per and mea­sur­ing cup. The plunger is designed for help­ing to process the thick mix­ture and remove the air pock­ets. In addi­tion, the tam­per comes with a Tam­per hold­er that also can be used as a mea­sur­ing cup.

Addi­tion­al Acces­sories: The unit also comes with a handy clean­ing brush and wash­able milk strain­er bag for mak­ing nuts, soy, rice, oats, nuts, or seeds alter­na­tive milk.

Blades

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender has an irre­mov­able base blade assem­bly that is per­ma­nent­ly inbuilt into the container.

The 8‑prongs ser­rat­ed blades are made from good qual­i­ty hard­ened stain­less steel. Blades are very sharp and should be han­dled with care when clean­ing or remov­ing the con­tain­er con­tent. The blade sys­tem is con­nect­ed to the met­al base and has all-met­al bear­ings to jar coupling.

Assembling, Operating, and Cleaning

Assem­bling: This blender is not dif­fi­cult to assem­ble for use because it has an irre­mov­able blade sys­tem. The user must place the jar on the top of the base unit, match­ing the posi­tion indi­ca­tor (lit­tle white arrow) on the pitch­er with a sim­i­lar posi­tion indi­ca­tor on the base unit (it will fit only in one direc­tion). Then fill the blender with ingre­di­ents, place the lid on the jar, press it firm­ly, then turn it clock­wise until the lid brace on the cov­er will catch the jar brace, so in this posi­tion, the lid safe­ty lock will be posi­tioned with the jar handle.

Once it sits appro­pri­ate­ly and the lid is sec­u­lar­ly locked into the place, the OFF sign will appear on the LED dis­play, indi­cat­ing that the blender is ready to run.

The jar is equipped with a vent­ed 2–part lid (rub­ber lid and lock cap). So the lock­ing cap could be removed for adding extra ingre­di­ents dur­ing blend­ing or for using the tam­per. The cap also intends to release the steam pres­sure dur­ing the pro­cess­ing of hot ingredients.

You have to select appro­pri­ate pre-set or man­u­al pro­gram­ma­ble set­tings and press the Start/Pause but­ton to run the machine.

Clean­ing: The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender is not easy to clean. Main­ly since the jar has a con­cealed heat­ing ele­ment, you can­not wet the bot­tom of the jar where the heat­ing ele­ment is locat­ed. In addi­tion, the jar is not dish­wash­er safe; you can clean it only with a blender lid and tam­per in the dishwasher.

The blender could be clean only by hand or/and using the CLEAN pre-set pro­gram, includ­ing adding a few drops of soap into the con­tain­er filled halfway with water and run­ning the CLEAN pro­gram, then rinse thor­ough­ly and dry with a cloth. If you have some stuff stuck at the bot­tom of the jar (which often hap­pens), you can also brush it man­u­al­ly with soap and water.

Alter­na­tive­ly, if some stub­born stuff builds up at the bot­tom, you can clean it with a bit of vine­gar and bak­ing soda, heat it with a hot pro­gram for a few min­utes, cool it down a bit, and scrub the bot­tom with the brush.

Spe­cial Features

Col­ors: This machine is avail­able in three col­ors – black, grey, and metal­lic silver.

Cer­ti­fied Refur­bished: The cer­ti­fied refur­bished mod­els are avail­able for this machine. How­ev­er, the price is almost sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal version.

Use in coun­tries out­side of the USA/Canada: This machine comes with a 110–120 volt­age sys­tem for use in the USA/Canada. The blender could oper­ate via volt­age trans­former in the regions with a 220–240 Volts sys­tem, but it will void the war­ran­ty. There­fore, it is advised to buy the blender via local retailers.

Set Includes

• Base Unit with 1000 Watts Blender and 800 Watts heater motor;
• 56 Oz (1600 ml) glass pitch­er with per­ma­nent­ly inbuilt stain­less steel blade and con­cealed heat­ing element;
• 2‑parts vent­ed lid with lid cap;
• Cus­tom tamper;
• Mea­sur­ing Cup and Tam­per Handle
• Clean­ing Brush;
• Strain­er bag;
• User man­u­al.

The blender pack does not include a recipe book. How­ev­er, you can get an excel­lent Instant Pot Ace Blender Cook­book: Fool­proof Recipes for the Blender That Also Cooks on Ama­zon called that has many ideas on how to use this blender to pre­pare from fab­u­lous stew to frozen desserts and a lot more.

Warranty and Customer Service

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender comes with a 1‑year LIMITED war­ran­ty for the machine. It cov­ers only cus­tomers who pur­chased the blender from local autho­rized retail­ers in USA and Cana­da or oth­er countries.

The repair­ing or replace­ment will require pay­ing ship­ping costs. How­ev­er, you should remem­ber that the blender is very heavy, and the ship­ping cost will be con­sid­er­able. 

Noise

This machine is noisy and out­puts about 70–90 deci­bels depend­ing on the ingre­di­ents you blend and is sim­i­lar to the blenders with sim­i­lar pow­er capacity.

Optional Accessories and Attachments

There are no extra acces­sories or attach­ments avail­able for this machine.

There are also NO replace­ment parts avail­able for this blender. How­ev­er, if you need to replace the jar, lid, just lid gas­ket, or any oth­er part, the cus­tomer ser­vice will offer you to buy a new blender with a dis­count (usu­al­ly 15–20%).

Dimensions

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender is a bulky machine. It has a large foot­print of 9.37 x 8 inch­es and a per­fect height pro­file of 16.9 inch­es to fits under stan­dard kitchen shelves.

It is a heavy machine, which weighs about 11.88 pounds/5.4 kg. Despite this fact, it does trav­el over the counter dur­ing oper­a­tion. It should also be men­tioned that the pitch­er weighs 5lb 9oz, which is hefty for most peo­ple and will be very hard to use for some­one with weak hands.

This machine, for safe­ty rea­sons, has a short pow­er sup­ply cord of only 35″/ 0.9 m and a stan­dard 3‑prong ground­ing plug.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender comes with a heavy-duty and super thick glass jar;
• It has a most com­pre­hen­sive range of fea­tures for the price tag, includ­ing cold and hot blend­ing, soy milk, and frozen desserts;
• It is equipped with a few safe­ty features;
• This very pow­er­ful and ver­sa­tile machine is able to pro­duce good qual­i­ty smooth­ies, includ­ing the green ones;
• The gad­get comes with a tam­per and allows eas­i­ly to process any thick mixtures;

Cons:

• This machine con­trol pan­el is very com­pli­cat­ed and requires a learn­ing curve;
• It comes with a very heavy pitch­er and is not suit­able for peo­ple with weak hands; It will not suit some­one with strength, wrest­ing, mobil­i­ty hand issues;
• The blender comes with only a 1‑year war­ran­ty for the unit;
• This machine is not easy to clean;
• There are no replace­ment parts avail­able to buy;
• The blender does not allow adjust­ing the cook­ing tem­per­a­ture for hot blend­ing settings.

Consumer Reviews

The blender has an excel­lent con­cept and comes with a pow­er­ful motor, glass jar, and heat­ing ele­ment to pre­pare hot recipes and very pro­fes­sion­al pro­mo­tion. It is very pop­u­lar with con­sumers who praise this gad­get that can per­form so many func­tions for such an attrac­tive price.

Instant Pot Ace Nova Blender Price

The price is very afford­able and often avail­able at a sub­stan­tial dis­count equal frac­tion of the orig­i­nal price. So it is a com­pul­so­ry mea­sure the man­u­fac­tur­er imple­ments to attract consumers.

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Summary

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Cook­ing Blender is a ver­sa­tile machine that can per­form func­tions and replace a few kitchen gad­gets while avail­able at a very rea­son­able price. It blends good qual­i­ty smooth­ies, makes excel­lent frozen treats, cooks hot soup, and even makes all non-dairy milk types, includ­ing nut, rice, and soy milk.

How­ev­er, this fan­tas­tic blender is not for every­one. First of all, it is very heavy, and the heat­ing ele­ment con­tributes to it. So if you intend to use its hot blend­ing func­tions for soup or soy/rice milk mak­ing, it is not real­ly worth buy­ing it. Besides, it is not easy to clean since you can­not expose the bot­tom part to water.

Instant Pot Ace Nova Blender vs. Vitamix Blender

Many cus­tomers asked ques­tions about if the Instant Pot Ace Nova Blender is com­pa­ra­ble to the Vita­mix Blender. How­ev­er, it is not fair to com­pare these two gadgets.

The Instant Pot Ace Nova Blender and Vita­mix Blender belong to dif­fer­ent price cat­e­gories. The Vita­mix is 4–6 times more expen­sive than Ace Nova. Still, the Vita­mix is a high-end machine with an excep­tion­al blend­ing qual­i­ty, ser­vice life length, the longest in indus­try war­ran­ty, and the best cus­tomer ser­vice. In con­trast, the Instant Pot Ace Nova Blender comes with a 1‑year war­ran­ty and has con­struc­tion and qual­i­ty issues. Nev­er­the­less, it is an excel­lent machine for its price cat­e­go­ry and is a great option to have a func­tion­al blender for a low price.

Would you con­sid­er an alter­na­tive option? Check out the arti­cle Best Blenders with Glass Jar.