Smooth Move

Check out this bit of copy from the Amazon page for this thing:

Get adventurous with our single whisk accessory. It’s just what you need to make frothy whipping cream, smooth mayonnaise, perfect pancake batter and more.

What’s funny here is that they’re right on the merits. A whisk attachment provides obvious utility. And yet, selling it this way? As some sort of wild new contraption, capable of taking you to the outer limits of the culinary plane? Seriously! Whipped cream? Mayo? PANCAKES?! Who could ever imagine?!

And yet, again, they’re not wrong. If this thing was an electric whisk and that was it, you’d still use it, and it might still be worth $30. But it’s not just an electric whisk. It’s also a hand blender and a little food processor, with a cup for making individual smoothies in.

Now, chances are, you already have things that do everything this thing can do. You probably have a blender. You might have a food processor. There’s a whisk somewhere down there in your junk drawer, and if you really put in some muscle, you can probably get the same result as the electric version. Maybe.

But this thing can do all those things in a way that’s a little less annoying.

Let me give you a personal example. I love making this white chicken chili recipe from Cooking Classy. It’s delicious, it’s comforting, and it comes together pretty easily. But then, there’s step 3:

Drain and rinse beans in a fine mesh strainer or colander then measure out 1 cup. Set whole beans aside, transfer 1 cup beans to a food processor along with 1/4 cup broth from soup, puree until nearly smooth.

Now, to be clear, there aren’t any difficult techniques here. It’s very simple, actually. What makes this step frustrating for me is that I have to haul out my huge food processor, make some room on the counter for it, get all the pieces fitted in right, all for blending a cup of beans with a quarter cup of stock. And then what inevitably happens is that I move on, finish the soup, eat dinner, and then come back out to the kitchen a couple hours later to clean up and find my food processor caked with bean cement.

If I had this thing, it’d be much easier. I could use the blender attachment in a bowl, or the food processor attachment, no counter space or heavy lifting required.

Neat, right? So get it. You’ll definitely use at least one of the functions.