Len Deighton would not be impressed with me. In his Action Cook Book he devotes a whole chapter to jug blenders, calling them his "Secret Weapon in the Kitchen." He uses his blender for a huge number of things, including making mayonnaise, grinding everything from coffee beans to rice, sieving flour, rescuing lumpy sauces, frothing milk for coffee, as well as liquidising or puréeing solids for soup, mousses and sandwich fillings.
I, on the other hand, am a bit scared of them. In fact, a full blown phobia has crept up on me over the years, due to a high number of accidents associated with them. I've lost count of the number of times I caused eruptions on a volcanic scale and just as hot, either because I had overfilled the thing or failed to remove the stopper when liquidising hot soup.
This was partly my fault – I could never wait for soup to stop steaming before transferring it to the blender. For years I didn't even realise that you were supposed to remove the central cap, assuming that the regularity with which the whole lid flew off, dousing me and my kitchen with scalding hot fluids, was a design fault. It got to the point that I was wincing every time I pressed the on button, in anticipation of the upwards explosion.
The last straw for me was when I accidentally ended up with around 20kg of very large venison livers and tried to use them up by making bulk proportions of paté. The recipe (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's from the Meat book) entails soaking breadcrumbs in milk and mixing with uncooked chopped livers and sweated onions before processing in a blender. I ended up with a foul smelling, lumpy paste a blood red colour marbled with various shades of sickly greyish pink. To make matters worse the blender just couldn't cope and after chuntering angrily away for several minutes, it started belching out black smoke and ground to a halt. The clean up operation that day was particularly grim, and that was the end of my relationship with jug blenders (and, for that matter, the remaining venison livers, which were enthusiastically finished off by a neighbour's dog).
Luckily for accident prone people like me, there is an alternative – hand, stick or immersion blender. The advantages of this type of blender are immediately apparent – less washing up, as you can blend at source instead of having to decant, they don't take up counter space, and many of them come with a fair few accessories as standard.
My first was a less sophisticated version of this one which has enough bells and whistles to elevate it almost to food processor territory. I particularly liked the chopping attachments – they seem more efficient than the jug blender at grinding spices and making curry pastes.
However, carelessness when assembling and daily use took its toll, particularly on some of the flimsier plastic parts. My second Braun recently died on me and I looked in vain for a replacement – they have stopped making them for the British market. Instead I opted for a Philips model – it has the same accessories, with an additional serrated blade for chopping ice. It also seems a bit more robust – the motor is more powerful and the plastic feels thicker – the smallest cup hasn't gone cloudy from scratching (a weakness of the Braun), despite being used as a spice grinder several times.
Supersized stick blenders are common in restaurants, though not universally loved. I recall a former boss of mine being obsessive about serving perfectly smooth soups, including Callaloo, which I felt should be much coarser, akin to the texture achievable when using a traditional wooden swizzle stick to blend it. He didn't believe an immersion blender could do as good a job as the jug blender. I am sure it can – if you hold the blender in the same place it creates a whirlpool through which everything eventually passes. I solved his paranoia by passing everything through a fairly coarse chinois to make sure no large chunks of vegetables had escaped the blade, but I wouldn't bother with this at home.
If you use a blender, which type do you favour? Are you a jug devotee or are you as accident prone with them as I am? Do you have any good tips for using either?
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