Hand blenders are a great kitchen tool that will help with making smoothies, soups, baby food, protein shakes, and many other uses. Specifically, “immersion hand blenders” are a very easy to use and versatile option for many uses. They mix in narrow spaces, as well as with precision, unlike hand mixers. What’s the best hand blender you can buy? Let’s take a look at the 5 most important features of great hand blenders and the top rated options on the market today.
5 Important Features To Consider For Choosing The Best Hand Blender
1. Watts/Motor Power- How many watts does the blender have? This is a very important feature to keep in mind because the less watts, the less powerful it is. It obviously depends on what you want to use the blender for when looking at this feature.
If you are going to generally be using it for softer blending, then lower wattage may not be a problem. However, some people like to blend thick chunky vegetables, dry ingredients, and other ingredients that need a little more power. It will depend on your needs how many watts you’ll need to choose.
Generally speaking, 200 watts and up can handle most, if not all, blending challenges. Any wattage less than that and the blender will be straining to do some heavy duty blending. Think smoothies, milkshakes and other soft blending for lower watt models.
2. Blend Control- An important factor to look at is the number of speeds a device has, and also how the blending is controlled.
Many higher power devices, like the DeLonghi 380-Watt Tri-Blade, will have anywhere from 1 to 9 speeds. Lower speeds are used for chopping and course blending, whereas higher speeds are used for fine pureeing.
A popular style of hand blender, such as the Cuisinart CSB-76BC Smart Stick, are one speed and turned on and off by a push button. For these models, while the button is pushed in it’s blending. To turn off, one simply releases the button. One can toggle between pulse and blend with these types of “one speed” hand blenders.
