What is a hand blender & why do you need one?
When it comes to preparing your favourite soups, smoothies, dressings, sauces and desserts, the hand blender can process your ingredients to the perfect consistency and texture that you desire. Let's discover the benefits of a hand blender and how when paired with attachments and accessories, becomes an all-in-one kitchen appliance that can blend, chop, crush, dice, slice and whisk, making food preparation simpler and quicker.
What is a hand blender?
A hand blender is a handy assistant to have in your kitchen to help you blend and chop ingredients quicker and easier without leaving a mess.
Also known as an immersion blender and stick blender, a hand blender is light enough to be hand-held in one hand and is immersed into the ingredients instead of pouring the ingredients into a jug like a conventional jug blender.
The hand blender basically performs the same functions as a jug blender, except with greater flexibility and portability. The Braun Hand Blenders come with attachments expanding the functions that home chefs can perform with a single appliance.
Why do you need a hand blender?
Multi-functional and Ease of use
The hand blender takes the fuss out of cooking, it combines numerous kitchen appliances into one solution. Braun has the world's largest attachment system, with its patented Easyclick design, the attachments are easy to attach and remove from the blending arm. The MultiQuick range of Hand blenders is your go-to-assistant that makes food preparation effortless. It can chop hard ingredients, grind spices, blend a soup straight in the pot quickly among other tasks.
Convenient and Anti-Splash
A hand blender is convenient to use as you can immerse it into almost any vessel, just as long as it’s deep enough to keep your ingredients inside and not splatter around. Our MultiQuick Hand blender series MultiQuick Hand blender solves the splashing issue with its unique flower bell shape cutter blending shaft, that works to keep your kitchen clean.
Blending inside any vessel means cutting down on washing the jug blender. Make your favourite breakfast smoothie directly in your drinking vessel, drink from it and take it with you on the move.
How convenient!
Blending small quantities
Ever used a jug blender only to find your ingredients splattered on the jug walls because there was too little to blend?
The hand blender solves the problem as the blender shaft fits into narrow containers. A meal for one or two persons deserves the convenience of a blender too. Our MultiQuick 7 Hand blenders come with a narrow measurable beaker and a blade that shifts up and down (ActiveBlade Technology) to ensure even small amounts of ingredients/liquid are blended well. You also have a 350ml chopper accessory, handy when chopping/grinding small quantities.
Greater control in blending & whisking
When the hand blender is operated in one hand, it is easy to manoeuvre the blender to target a specific area and change the speed by pushing a button in the same hand to smoothly increase or decrease the power.
The MultiQuick 7 Hand blender features an intuitive SmartSpeed Technology where simply applying pressure on the control button by squeezing adjusts the power without interruption. Whether it's a sauce, soup, or whipping up your favourite mousse, achieve your desired consistency without breaking a sweat.
Compact and Quick to Clean
One of the benefits of a hand blender is how its size fits neatly in your kitchen drawer and is light enough to remove in one hand. The attachments and accessories save you from purchasing more appliances which free up space in your kitchen. What more they are removable and dishwasher safe. Simply rinse the blender shaft and blade soon after use to easily remove food stuck on the blade.
Braun's MultiQuick 7 Hand blender matt steel design also makes a modern centrepiece on your countertop. It stands upright and occupies just a tiny space, great for easy access to the blender. There’s also an option of the hand blender stand so you can keep it neatly within reach on your countertop everyday.
Variable Speeds
Use lower speed settings for softer or liquid recipes like batter, oil dressing, vanilla sauce, to froth milk and more. Increase your speed for pureed soups with harder vegetable chunks, thick hummus, herb butter and smoothies with fibrous greens.
The Braun MultiQuick 7 hand blender's intuitive speed control feature allows you to adjust the power intuitively with the simple squeeze of one button, letting you control to achieve the results you want.
The Braun MultiQuick Vario 5 hand blender features a 21 speed dial, offering precision of speed by turning the dial while you squeeze the button to blend.
Key differences between hand blenders and jug blenders
Hand blenders and jug blenders are both used to combine and process food ingredients to get a semi-fine mixture and ultra-fine consistency depending on your purpose, however, there are some key differences.
Unlimited volume vs volume of jug
A jug blender is a countertop blender that features a removable container attached to a bulky motorised base. The contents have to be poured into the container and covered with a lid to blend.
Whereas a hand blender is immersed directly into any vessel to blend, the stick and blades can fit inside most vessels from a large stock pot over the stove to a narrow smoothie bottle making it easy to blend small and large quantities as you can manoeuvre where the blades reach.
The jug blender, on the other hand, can only blend up to it's capacity, if you have a large pot of soup to blend, it may take a few rounds of blending and then combining the blended soup to ensure all the soup is well mixed. In this case, the hand blender would have done the job more efficiently.
Greater control of the blending vs preset blending
Both hand blenders and jug blenders have variable speed settings that can be adjusted to suit your purpose. However, because the hand blender is light and hand-held, you are free to manoeuvre the blender around the container, stir and move up and down to mash a potato to your desired size.
If you were using a jug blender, you would not have that control over what the blade cuts at a given point in time. Not to mention, you’ll also have the flexibility to change to another attachment such as the spice grinder, masher, or even jug blender whenever you need to.
Hardness of ingredients you are blending / chopping
Generally, blenders come with stronger powered motors and hard blades that can cut through harder ingredients like raw beetroot and crush ice.
The Braun MultiQuick 7 Hand blender equipped with a 1000W powerful motor, ultra hard stainless steel blade and a 1.25L blender jug accessory will cut through hard ingredients and crush ice effortlessly.
What to look for when choosing a hand blender
Good grip and Easy control
Test out the hand blender if you can before purchasing to have a feel of the weight and grip when using it. It should sit comfortably in your hand and feel natural when you are rotating the blender arm and moving it up and down. Braun MultiQuick Hand blenders are designed ergonomically to ensure comfort for the user.
Variable speeds
A hand blender with variable speeds controllable by the user allows you to control the speed and achieve the right consistency and texture, depending on the coarseness or fineness that you want in your sauces, drinks and soups.
Braun’s MultiQuick 7 Hand Blender puts the power in your hand with the intuitive speed control feature. Simply apply pressure on the control button to adjust the power seamlessly as you blend.
The Braun MultiQuick 5 Vario hand blender features a dial with 21 speeds controlled in one hand. As you blend, simultaneously adjust the speed dial giving you maximum precision and perfect control over the consistency and texture you want.
Blade Power
The blade of the hand blender determines the result of chopped ingredients and whether it has enough power to cut through hard ingredients like nuts and chocolate pieces to an even size without overworking the blender.
Braun’s unique ActiveBlade in the MultiQuick 7 Hand Blender ensures hard-to-cut ingredients are evenly chopped by moving up and down and has 250% more active cutting surface while chopping. The evenness of your ingredients will help your dish turn out tastier and produce a polished appearance like when using chocolate shavings to decorate cakes.
Accessories save you money and bring convenience
Instead of spending on several appliances to help in your meal preparation, choose hand blenders that come with multiple accessories like a chopper, ice crusher and whisk to declutter your kitchen and bring savings. Braun’s patented EasyClick designs ensure ease in switching between accessories when preparing meals.
The MultiQuick 7 Hand blender has a wide range of accessories that makes it the ultimate all-in-one kitchen appliance for food preparation. What you can do is only limited by your creativity.
Here is a glimpse of some cool recipes you can follow using our multi-functional hand blender, cooking doesn't have to be complicated, these simple to make yet flavourful dishes are possible with our hand blenders. We show you how over here.
Conclusion
Controlled in your hand, easy to clean and compact with unlimited uses like blending your favourite creamy soups, whipping up a fluffy cake batter, chopping up nuts evenly in seconds, and blending a fruit and vegetable power-packed smoothie, the hand blender helps home cooks save time on preparation, cleaning and makes preparing your everyday meals even more enjoyable. For a mighty kitchen assistant, check out Braun’s MultiQuick 7 and MultiQuick 5 hand blenders.
