Immersed

I received many things for Christmas this year: a pair of socks, a hat, books, a hand-made yellow belt made to look like Swiss cheese. But the best gift of all was the immersion blender. Perhaps the cutest and most handy of all culinary power tools, an immersion blender (stick blender, burr mixer, whatever you care to call it) is as my brother most eloquently put, “like the food processor… on a stick.” I’m not sure I can give you a better description: it is practically a double blade with a long handle and a guard, that you can stick into soups, sauces, smoothie glasses, milk pitchers, or anything with reasonably steep sides that contains the ingredients you want to blend together. I have immediately put it to work foaming hot milk for cappuccinos, since I lack a milk steamer. Later on I found out that you can do a single serving of whipped cream in a tall juice glass, and that lumpy gravy can be easily mended with about a half a minute of immersion blending. The best part of this tool, and the reason I don’t simply rely on the blender or food processor for the same tasks, is the clean-up and convenience. The head of the immersion blender pops off with the push of a button, and is easily washed– even the blade is easy to get to and rinse off, and for a really fast cleaning, you can forego removing the blender head and just stick it into a pot or sink full of hot water, turn it on for a few seconds, and voila.

Alright, that’s my dreamy extolment of my newest kitchen gadget, the baby of my many kitchen tools. I must add a few words of caution, however: my baby and I have gotten into some mischief in the kitchen (though luckily while no one else was watching). Here are the top things you shouldn’t try with your new immersion blender, unless you were planning on repainting your kitchen anyway.

1)   NEVER turn the blender on before putting it into the material to be blended. Picture filling a blender with vegetable soup and then turning it on without putting the lid on. You’ll not only be repainting the walls of your kitchen, but also the ceiling, cabinets, floor, appliances…

2)   Don’t try blending large chunks without liquid. Dry ingredients like flour and sugar can be blended together as long as the container is deep (and in the absence of a low-speed option, you have a towel or plastic wrap over top to catch the dust cloud). But things like, say, frozen blueberries can turn into lethal shrapnel if there isn’t any liquid to keep them together.

3)   Don’t lift the blender out of the blended material before turning it off. This produces roughly the same effect as turning the blender on before putting it in. Once you’ve gotten the hang of how your burr mixer handles itself in different ingredients, you can lift it up just enough to incorporate air into the ingredients, which is quite useful for meringues and whipped cream. However, this requires some skill and careful control, because the head of the blender tends to suction itself to the bottom of the container. Pull up gently while holding the container down firmly, or turn the blender off and hold it in the middle of the liquid before turning it back on, but expect it to pull down immediately.

4)   Always make sure your container is well grounded. Be it a sauce pot, glass bowl, plastic cup (many blenders come with a graduated blending cup), or other container, please make sure it is either heavy enough to fend for itself, or held down. Without this precaution, the blender can quite easily send the entire container spinning off, spraying its contents along the way. As a general rule for mixing anything, it’s good to have your container sitting on a towel or rubber mat, rather than a polished countertop that will let it slide willy-nilly.

Other than these basic concepts, it’s hard to go wrong with an immersion blender: they’re adorably compact, easy to clean, easily unplugged and stored away when you’re finished with them. I have blended an individual smoothie and a 5-gallon pot of soup with the same simple tool, and have just started exploring the possibilities in the realm of mixed drinks.

And my mother hasn’t noticed the splatters of blueberry on the ceiling yet.