I met a new foodie friend, and when I told her, "OK, you have to get a pressure cooker, really it will change your life" She said to me, "OK, but do you have an immersion blender? No? Well you have to get one, because it will change you life." In Part 2 of, Why Did That Take So Long? Scott and Linda get an immersion blender. The immersion blender is one of those hand-held "stalk" blenders that look a little like the paint mixer that professional painters use. So far we've discovered three main uses, and they are big.
1) Many soups need to be blended or pureed at the end. Often the recipe says, puree in batches in a blender or food processor. We've done this several times, and after a while we just gave up unless the recipe looked too good to pass up. The problem is that you're ladling hot soup into the food processor, which doesn't hold that much before the soup goes above the blade shaft and starts to ooze out underneath the bowl. There are always spills and it takes many batches to get a good Puree. The Blender holds more and doesn't ooze, but instead, it can blow the lid off and spew hot soup (usually in some intense color) in all directions. Drum-roll..... enter the immersion blender. Right in the cooking pot you insert the blender to the bottom and turn it on. Because of the way the blades rotate, the blender pulls itself to the bottom, where it purees. If there are chunky ingredients you can slowly raise and lower the blender to get the bigger chunks. There is so much more control that you can do the thing where you puree say 1/3 or 1/2 the soup, to leave the integrity of the ingredients, while building a rich broth with the puree. Now we're talking, and a whole new set of great recipes are open to us. This post will be followed by the cooking gadget 1-2 punch "Saturday Morning Black Bean Soup" cooked in the pressure cooker, and then 1/3 pureed with the immersion blender. Awesome.
2) Vinaigrettes: Many sound great, but to get a really nice emulsification you want to blend in the food processor or blender. Overkill for just a little vinaigrette. Most immersion blenders come with a beaker shaped cup that works perfectly for making vinaigrettes and dressings/marinades. Clean-up is simple and the results are excellent.
3) Smoothies. The beaker for ours (we got the red KitchenAid pictured here) is large enough to make smoothies for two. We usually make them out of frozen fruit, yogurt, milk and sometimes some protein shake powder. The ability to raise and lower the blender blades in the tumbler makes the process much more predictable than in a blender. My only caveat is that the blades are rather thin, so if I'm going to use ice in the smoothy, I think I'll crack it a little bit, rather than smashing the blades down on an intact ice-cube.
The stalk clicks off of the motor assembly and can be dishwasher washed, or easily hand cleaned (much easier than either a food processor bowl and blade, or the blender). Ours came with a food processor bowl that is allegedly good for small batches of salsa etc and I bet that's true, we just haven't tried it.
DRI-Moment: get an immersion blender!
