Why the hand blender is the ultimate kitchen helper for you even for Asian cooking

In an increasingly fast paced world, it’s easy to forget to eat well and live a healthy lifestyle. What’s more, in Asian countries like Singapore where local food is so easily available and affordable, there’s hardly any incentive to cook a nourishing meal from scratch. Do you wish you had more time to buy groceries, cook a hearty meal from scratch and clean up?

The hand blender is an essential tool in western professional kitchens and is becoming very popular among home cooks. Both professional chefs and home cooks alike, love the hand blender for its convenience, versatility, compact and easy to clean design making food prep faster and clean up simpler.

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.

In an Asian kitchen, the use of the hand blender is still relatively rare when preparing food and drink. In Chinese cuisine, chefs and home cooks rely on cleavers, knives, and roller pins to get their food prep done. From cutting vegetables, to chopping and mincing meat, everything would be done manually with their knives.

In a Peranakan, Malay, Indian and Thai kitchen, you’d find the mortar and pestle. Curry and chilli pastes gourmands swear by grinding spices in the mortar because it adds depth and brings out the best flavours in your curries.

As mouth-watering as that might sound, the amount of ingredients you can pound at one time is limited by the size of the mortar, which is about the size of a small noodle bowl. Be prepared to spend time and effort as you manually work the pestle to crush and grind all the ingredients.

Are you a working person and/or a mum with young children who wants to cook healthy meals but simply are too busy or tired after work? If you’re wondering how you can prepare food quicker without compromising on quality, the hand blender is the ultimate kitchen helper for you.

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, mince, and whisk, making food preparation simpler and quicker.

Why do you need a hand blender?

1.Multi-functional and Easy to use

The hand blender when paired with attachments makes cooking fuss-free, it combines numerous kitchen appliances into one solution, making it your go-to assistant for effortless food preparation.  

Declutter your kitchen and save money with the MultiQuick 7 hand blender which comes with accessories and attachments including a chopper, ice-crusher, whisk, masher, and spice grinder.

2. Splash-proof blending and a spotless kitchen

Did you know you can immerse a hand blender into almost any vessel, if it’s deep enough to keep your ingredients inside and not splatter around. You save time transferring food here and there and use fewer crockery.

3. Compact and Frees up kitchen space

One of the benefits of a hand blender is how it fits neatly in your kitchen drawer and is light enough to hold in one hand. What’s more, the accessories save you from needing more appliances and free up space in your kitchen.

Most of MultiQuick 7 hand blenders parts are detachable and dishwasher safe. Simply rinse the blender shaft and blade soon after use to easily remove food stuck on the blade. Spend more time cooking and less time washing.

4. Great for blending small amounts

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. The MultiQuick 7 comes with a 600ml beaker ideal for blending small amounts without the mess. Cooking for one or two persons, deserves the convenience of blending too.

5. Variable Speeds for control over size and consistency

Some models come with dual speed settings, for those who like precise control over the speed, Braun’s hand blenders give you absolute control over the speed to get your desired texture in food prep.

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. 

Now that we know what makes hand blenders so useful to have in our kitchen. Let’s discuss how we can incorporate its usage more into Asian cooking.

We will illustrate 3 scenarios where you can use the hand blender to prepare everyday Asian sauces and condiments.

1. Making Sambal Tumis suitable for chilli crab, prawns & more 

 
Traditionally, cooks would use a mortar and pestle to grind the ingredients 1) to 5), slowly grinding aromatics against the mortar to extract the essential oils for maximum flavour.  

For time-strapped cooks like you and me, the hand blender is our best friend here. The beauty of the MultiQuick 7 hand blender is the variable speed allows you to control the blending speed. Start off by blending slowly, which may deliver a result closer to the mortar and pestle. You can experiment with the speeds to create your optimal sambal tumis base.  

Method using the hand blender

Step 1

Place the dried chillies, red chilli, garlic, shallots, and chilli padi into a vessel and blend with the MultiQuick 7 hand blender until there are no more bits of ingredients left. Alternatively, you can use the jug blender attachment to blend your ingredients.

Step 2

Heat up oil in a wok, add the blended chilli paste and belachan, and fry and stir the chilli paste till fragrant. Cook the chilli paste for another 10-15min until the colour becomes a dark red.

Step 3

Add in sugar and tamarind juice and continue to cook. Stirring often until you see the oil has separated from the paste which is when it’s about ready. Add sugar and salt at this stage to season.

2. Grinding beans & spices

Have you run out of five-spice powder or pepper and all you have is whole spices in the kitchen? Without having to leave your house, the spice grinder attachment will process your spices to tiny pieces effortlessly.

With so many accessories, the Braun MQ7 Hand blender always has an efficient solution to help you prep food the way you want it. What you can do is limited by your creativity.

 Click the blender arm to the spice grinder, fill the container with your spices and grind away, taking only seconds to give you powdery spices.    

3. Mincing meats

To get mincemeat from a piece of meat, most home cooks would cut the meat into smaller pieces, reduce the size further and flatten it before finally chopping through the meat till it becomes mince. That’s many steps involved and quite the arm workout.

Did you know MultiQuick 7 has a chopper that minces and chops effortlessly in a matter of seconds, saving you time and effort. Simply cut the meat into cubes that fit inside the chopper and let the chopper do the work for you.

With the versatile uses of the MultiQuick 7 hand blender, this definitely makes it to the list of a must-have kitchen helper for every Asian kitchen.

Delight family and friends with your favourite local recipes that you can whip up in a fraction of the time of traditional food preparation methods.

Discover Braun’s range of hand blenders that suit your culinary needs here.