Otherwise, the cooking process threatens to turn into an everyday catastrophe.
Soup-puree and sauce, mixture for omelet and smoothie, dough and filling for pies and dumplings – a blender can do it all. This miracle of technology replaced our obsolete food processor and mixer, saving space and energy that we spent on laundering its monster predecessors. However, the blender is not omnivorous, and you need to know some rules for using it. For example, these 12 products require special handling.
1. Greens at room temperature
Spinach, parsley, dill, and other leafy vegetables are great ingredients for smoothies. But there is one subtlety here: if you beat the greens in a blender, it will lose its bright shade and turn into a brown slurry. To avoid this, you need to either cool the greens or add some ice to it.
2. Broccoli
And other vegetables that are high in fiber. To cope with them, you need a particularly powerful blender. And the usual one turns broccoli, for example, into a bunch of thin veins – it does not grind the vegetable, but breaks it down. It doesn’t look like a smoothie, and you definitely won’t be able to drink it through a straw.
3. Frozen berries
As well as vegetables and fruits – a blender can easily cope with only frozen herbs, if they were cut before freezing. If you throw berries into the bowl just from the freezer, then you get, at best, a lumpy puree. At worst, the nozzle blades will crack. So it is better to get the berries in advance so that they thaw a little.
4. The nuts
Or something else like that, like coffee beans or cocoa beans. Such solid foods will dull the blender, and the gadget will knock the nuts into a sticky pasty mass. It is better to grind the nuts in a meat grinder or just chop with a knife.
5. Products with a strong odor
Such as onions or garlic, and hot peppers. Plastic and metal are insensitive to substances that impart a sharp taste and aroma to products. But the rubber seals are very even. In the evening we made a spicy sauce, and in the morning we drink a fruit smoothie with a garlic aftertaste. And washing will not help, it will only fade over time.
6. Too much or too little liquid
When the blender is running, water or any other liquid must be poured very carefully, otherwise the whole kitchen will be splattered with your smoothie. If you add too little water, the mixture will be lumpy. And if there is a lot, then the knives simply will not get to solid foods, and the output will be an indistinct broth instead of mashed potatoes.
7. Products with seeds
Surprisingly, inexperienced cooks often make this mistake: when they prepare minced meat for fish or chicken meatballs, they leave bones in the pulp. Sometimes not on purpose, but through an oversight. But here you need to be very careful, and try to pull out every single one.
8. Meat
Yes, a blender is quite capable of chopping meat into minced meat. But the chefs say the mechanism kills all its texture at the same time. Juicy cutlets from such minced meat will not be, because you, in fact, got baby food, and not minced meat. Too fine puree looks more like a paste than a base for cutlets.
9. Tomatoes for the sauce
If you decide to make tomato sauce, prepare it without using a blender. It is better to rub in the old fashioned way through a sieve or gauze. Otherwise, the tomato puree will become too airy and take on a pink tint. It is not very cute when paired with meat or pasta.
10. Potato
Don’t make mashed potatoes in a blender. Anyway, starchy vegetables have no place in it. When whisked, mashed potatoes acquire an unpleasant texture and become tasteless. In general, potatoes should not be chopped too fanatically. Otherwise, it becomes too starchy.
11. Ginger
Due to its fibrous structure, it is difficult for a blender to grind the root in a puree. You just get a ball of thread. Therefore, it is better to chop or grate ginger.
12. Powdered products
Baking dough, flour, powdered sugar – you need to be extremely careful with all this. If you add flour to the liquid mixture and start whipping, the flour will be all over the kitchen – the blender will simply “exhale” it. To avoid this, add the flour slowly and at a very low rotational speed of the nozzle.