[Sca-cooks] Immersion blenders

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jan 8, 2006, at 9:45 AM, Volker Bach wrote:

> I've just come back from a feast kitchen I ran (sanity intact, for  
> a given
> value of 'intact') and I can vouch for the wonderfulness of immersion
> blenders. Good ones, that is.
>
> First of all, the front end *has* to detach, otherwise cleanup is a  
> nightmare.
> Secondly, it is also a good idea if you can unscrew the blades,  
> even if you
> don't have alternative toolsets for beating eggs or such (which the  
> high-end
> ones offer, and which are actually good). Thirdly, in this field,  
> wattage
> counts.
>
> I have a cheapo one (about ten bucks at the time) that I bought for  
> mixing my
> paints and glues. You can never get it properly clean, and if you  
> want to mix
> anything too thick it just gives up and overheatsd in no time at all.
> Basically, it will combine pigment and medium OK and can do  
> milkshake, as
> long as the fruit is soft.
>
> At site, we had a 600-watt immersion blender which worked  
> brilliantly at
> pureeing dry egg yolks. Faster and better than passing them through  
> a sieve,
> and no liquid added.
>
> And the lunch kitchen has one that looked more like a jackhammer. I  
> don't
> recall the wattage, but it pureed a 20-liter (5-gallon) pot of  
> cabbage soup
> to a creamy consistency in under two minutes.
>
> So, they are good if you shell out real money.

The machinery of which you speak is definitely out there. One of my  
first restaurant jobs included using one of these high-powered  
immersion blenders (I have no idea what its power rating was) to  
puree, rather than strain, the sum total of ingredients in a pot of  
mixed seafood stock. When it was cooked, it consisted of fish flesh,  
skin and bones, water, wine, various aromatic vegetables and herbs,  
tomatoes, peppercorns, an' zee piéce de [literal] resistance, whole  
lobsters and blue crabs, in their shells. All of it was pureed right  
in the pot, still hot, into a thick, gelatinous, slightly emulsified  
goop (with lots of bits of bone and shell) later strained through a  
fine chinois before being used as the basis for an assortment of fish  
soups.

It was _great_ when it was fresh and hot, and even better when used  
as the base liquid for bouillabaisse.

Adamantius


"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04