Why the Immersion Blender Is a Good Investment and the Best White Elephant Gift

The best White Elephant gift might just be an immersion blender. I’m biased because that’s what I once brought to a gift exchange, where I realized that, amongst the generic candles and portable speakers, it was the most useful tool of the bunch. After rounds of unwrapping and stealing, I made sure the Kitchenaid hand blender made its way back to me. It’s been years since that particular holiday party, but I’ve been in a love affair with my immersion blender ever since.

I am a soup girl. Every time fall comes around, all I want is to be stirring a cauldron of it , made even more velvety and smooth thanks to the immersion blender. Yes, some soups are better left in their chunky states. But others, like tomato and butternut squash, benefit from blending. There are a number of problems with using an actual blender to blend soup, though. For starters, it’s a pain to transfer a vat of soup into a blender . Doing so often requires several rounds of blending and, personally, my wrists can’t handle lifting my Dutch oven over and over (while my patience can’t handle spooning the soup in ladle by ladle).

Then there’s the fear of accidentally building a bomb in the blender. When steam from hot soup is whipped in a vortex, it’s possible for pressure to build up enough to blow off the blender’s lid and paint the ceiling with soup chunks. The clean-up process for such an accident is only slightly worse than cleaning the actual blender, which requires separating a handful of parts and washing each one individually, lest you leave food trapped between the blades or in the tiny crevices.

A stick blender, however, demands minimal clean-up. When it comes to the Kitchenaid stick blender, a quick soapy rinse for a single, detachable part is all you need. And beyond the clean-up, the ease of using a stick blender is profound. All I have to do is plug it in and, as its name suggests, stick the immersion part into the soup and let it rip.

But an immersion blender is not just for soups. It works well for breaking down fresh apple sauce, whipping cream, and emulsifying salad dressings. You can use it to make hummus, pesto, and even mayonnaise. And yes, like a regular blender, you can also use it for smoothies.

To this day, I still don’t own a traditional blender because my immersion blender has proven that it can do everything — all while taking up way less space. And now that it’s soup season, it’s time for my immersion blender to shine yet again.