Hell ya! Quality kitchen wedding gifts are always the best. Ours was the Cuisinart Custom 14-cup food processor, the ones with the really heavy base. Been going for 12 years now. Some of the new Cuisinart models (like ones at CostCo) are crazy lightweight and don't feel like they'll last.@@JKenjiLopezAlt
His breville induction burner is the real show stopper! Those things are amazing. Thanks for the tip about the towel and the steam! Always wondered why pro's did that instead of using the top plug that the vitamix comes with
My sage blender's cap actually has a steam hole to release steam. I'm pretty sure new vitamixes also have this feature. In fact they advertise the ability to make hot soups from cold veg.
In reality, the towel really isn't necessary, as Vitamix already thought this through, and the clear plastic topper already has vent gaps built in for steam. The reason restaurants use the towel is because these plastic caps are obnoxious and cumbersome, since most chefs like to add/drizzle things into a blender while it's running anyway. Constantly removing and inserting these caps would be annoying, and one extra piece of equipment floating around is just a liability, so most kitchens just throw them away. The towel is just mostly there to prevent too much splatter. It is a bit risky though, so I wouldn't leave the towel unattended. All it takes is for a minute or so of steam and vibrations to pull that towel in and your blender motor is fucked. I still use the towel trick, too, but I'm just saying exercise caution.
I've always wondered how one can get a houmous to a similary smooth and creamy consistency. I've never managed to find a way to get all the chickpea chunks away, I love a chunky Houmous but every so often a silky smooth one would be nice too.
A fast and clean way is to just use an immersion blender right in the chinois. The vortex chops up the pieces that are too big to make it through the mesh.
Make a corn sauce, straining the same way. Make mini tamales, using cheese and strained detritus. Add Morita peppers and red bells to the corn sauce. Put 2 tamales into the soup and pipe the corn sauce garnish on top of the exposed bits of mini-tamales😊😊😊
Thoughts on that olive oil? I have seen some RUclips chefs promoting it and was turned off by having to order it from their website, but my local grocery store now has it.
Another really important note is to not overwhelm your blender, even a high-powered one, and ESPECIALLY a Vitamix 5200 like he has needs proper portioning. Yes, it is a powerful blender, but see how the top is really wide but the base is narrow? That's a great feature that allows you to make both larger and smaller batches of things, so it's a versatile machine for home cooks, but it means that the volumetric output from that blade is much more limited than say a Vitamix 7500 designed with a much wider base and larger blade. I personally prefer the 5200 style like Kenji's because I can get a cleaner emulsification in a small batch of something without too much air being incorporated, but the trade-off is that you need to give the blender more TIME to work. Sometimes you need to set a 2-3 minute timer for a soup and just let it rip for a while (wear noise cancelling headphones). The smaller blade at the base means that it needs more revolutions to get the same amount of work done as a blade with 4x-5x surface area. Also, because the blade has a much shorter length than a wide-base pitcher, the RPM needs to be way higher because the outer ends of the blade aren't moving nearly as fast as the ends of a blade that is several times wider. This is why it also helps to only fill your blender like 60%-65% full, especially with something viscous like a thick soup. The less weight your motor has to move around, the more RPM it can generate, and the faster the blade will be able to shred anything in its path, and you'll get a more efficient and clean output in batches than you would trying to fit it all in one go. Blade speed is your friend, not only in terms of how quickly things blend, but also how much force and ability the blender will have to break up the particles. Just my 2¢.
Generally, it'll settle out on its own unless you make a thick soup with a lot of fat or emulsifiers. Simmering it again tends to speed up the process, in my experience.
Honestly, this is a fantastic question. This is actually why Kenji's 5200 model has a narrower base, to help you combat this problem without having to make massive batches every time. The reason air gets incorporated is because of the way the liquid vortex make a funnel of air in the center. If the blender speed is high enough, that vortex of air will reach all the way down to the blade, and it will basically whip air into whatever you're blending. The wider top above the narrower base of the 5200 pitcher helps to apply more downward pressure and condense the contents, resisting the vortex and delaying the issue you're describing. The blenders with straighter, less tapered sides can blend larger batches more quickly and easily, but suffer more from this air issue. There are basically 2 ways to influence this: speed and volume/mass. The higher the speed, the more likely that vortex of air will extend all the way down to the blades, sucking in air. However, sometimes you still need the highest speeds to get the job done, so this is where the size of the batch comes into play. If you have a super small batch, the blades easily become exposed to air because they have very little resistance from the lighter weight of the contents, so increasing the batch size helps to give the blade more work, and therefore you can rip the speed higher without exposing the blades to air. When I'm making something that will suffer from too much air incorporation (like a French custard), I carefully watch the depth of the vortex while adjusting the speed, so I know when to stop increasing it. You can also really hear the difference as well; once the vortex of air reaches the blades, there is a very distinct sloshing sound you can hear from the blades beating in the air, almost like the sound you hear when steaming latte milk and the wand tip rises above the surface. Lastly, I said volume/mass, and not just volume alone. That's because these each affect how hard the blade/motor have to work. Depending on how heavy the contents are, you don't necessarily need a specific minimum amount of volume to avoid the "whipping" effect. If you're blending something particularly dense and viscous, you can get away with a lower volume because you have added mass, and the blender will have to work much harder to get that vortex to extend all the way down to the blades. A great example of this would be something like tahini, where I can only blend like 2 cups of it t high speed, but it is so insanely thick that the vortex can't fully develop (at least in the 5200 Vitamix). However, 2 cups of asparagus soup would go splashing all over the place at high speed. So this is really just a LOOONG-winded way of saying that you need to play around with viscosity, ingredient amounts, and blender speeds to monitor the air issue. But being strategic about it can really help you avoid having to wait like 20 minutes for your pink tomato soup to turn back to brick red. =) P.S. One last PRO tip? This is also why being patient in the beginning and turning up the speed slowly is so important. Ever notice how in the early stages of a full-speed blend, things are sort of bouncing up and down and you can even hear the pitch of the motor oscillating with the sloshing? But then after like 15 seconds of blending, things sort of even out, and now the top of the blending contents are super stable and the motor sound is smooth? That's because the speed was too high at the beginning, and the chunky contents were creating a lot of interference to the flow. All that sloshing around is also giving the blade plenty of opportunity to beat air into the mix. So be patient. Slowly creep up the speed for 30 seconds or so, letting more and more chunks break down without creating a sloshing in the pitcher. Then once you turn it on high, the turbulence will be much more stable and air won't get in.
There is surely nothing worse than washing sieves. With the possible exception of being Garth Crooks. Do you switch the kitchen light off with your chin?
Kenji has talked about this in another video (a few months back I believe), but basically he turns the strainer upside-down in the sink and sprays the faucet jet through it from the bottom and the outer sides. This removes most of the little bits of things, and it quickly looks quite clean. I do something similar, although I additionally like to take a softer nylon bottle brush and gently scrub inside and out; you've gotta be careful because sometimes the little strands like to get caught up in the sieve layers, but I mostly do this to remove any residual oils. Like Kenji also mentioned, there will always be little flecks and bits of "stuff" that just doesn't want to come out of the chinois, but the thought is that if they don't want to come out easily, then they probably won't come out the next time you use it and they can just live in the stainer. 🤣 It's honestly not that bad to clean given the massive benefits the food gets in terms of refinement. In reality, the real nuisance about using a conical sieve is just it's awkward shape and size; once it's been dirtied, it's not really easy to rest it somewhere without making a mess, so you just end up leaving it in the sink where it gets in the way. But chinois are lovely kitchen companions that deserve more love. :)
It’s not about length of time, it’s about aerating it and oxidizing as well as shearing it. This olive oil is way too diluted for that to happen. It really only happens if you blend pure oil or sauces witb a very high oil content (like a vinaigrette or mayo).
Kenji I heard somewhere on the Internet that you should never put olive oil in a blender because it shreds the molecules and makes it turn bitter. Is there any truth to that or complete myth? Or maybe it's okay when you have so many other ingredients in the blender?
It has to do more with aerating than with shredding. If you beat excess air into olive oil, the oxidation brings out a lot more bitter notes to the flavor, so making a rouille in a blender would probably be a very bad idea. But in this case, Kenji is emulsifying oil into a larger batch of an already thick soup, so there really isn't much air being incorporated at this point. Although if you were worried about the risk of air being incorporated, you could just dial down the speed a little bit, and be fine.
You make a great point. Also seems like a good way to make little flat spots on the steel. Ribbed honing steels are worthless anyway. Polished steels are the way. :)
Wait for a good sale at least. They do go on sale sometimes. I picked up a 5200 for $300 I think on a prime day last year. It's still rather steep, but more doable with a good deal.
You can also by them used. I bought a used motor for like $180, and then you can just buy a new blender cup a la cart if you are grossed out by used ones. those motors will last a home cook forever.
I used to think people who spent that kind of money on blenders were absolute suckers, but that's because I only grew up using cheap $20 blenders for things like milkshakes and smoothies, and had never seen what a quality blender could do. If you are someone who wants to try serious cooking in the kitchen, a quality blender is an amazing asset. Don't be fooled by the "all-in-one" budget brands like Ninja. Those blenders are not even the same league of product.
Хобби
My vitamix is about the only luxury I have afforded myself in the past several years. Well worth it.
Ours was a wedding gift. Still running strong after 18 years.
Hell ya! Quality kitchen wedding gifts are always the best. Ours was the Cuisinart Custom 14-cup food processor, the ones with the really heavy base. Been going for 12 years now. Some of the new Cuisinart models (like ones at CostCo) are crazy lightweight and don't feel like they'll last.@@JKenjiLopezAlt
His breville induction burner is the real show stopper! Those things are amazing. Thanks for the tip about the towel and the steam! Always wondered why pro's did that instead of using the top plug that the vitamix comes with
My sage blender's cap actually has a steam hole to release steam. I'm pretty sure new vitamixes also have this feature. In fact they advertise the ability to make hot soups from cold veg.
In reality, the towel really isn't necessary, as Vitamix already thought this through, and the clear plastic topper already has vent gaps built in for steam. The reason restaurants use the towel is because these plastic caps are obnoxious and cumbersome, since most chefs like to add/drizzle things into a blender while it's running anyway. Constantly removing and inserting these caps would be annoying, and one extra piece of equipment floating around is just a liability, so most kitchens just throw them away. The towel is just mostly there to prevent too much splatter. It is a bit risky though, so I wouldn't leave the towel unattended. All it takes is for a minute or so of steam and vibrations to pull that towel in and your blender motor is fucked. I still use the towel trick, too, but I'm just saying exercise caution.
Thanks for the insight@@dirtyketchup ! Makes sense
Thanks for the great tips. Absolutely love your channel. What an inspiration 🥰
very useful! I had made a bisque for christmas eve, but couldnt get it quite smooth enough
Great technique Kenji! I ferment chilis to make hot sauce and do the same thing - the sauce is always silky smooth.
i made roasted tomato soup in a blender, last week. very very good soup.
Souper!
thank kenji!
I've always wondered how one can get a houmous to a similary smooth and creamy consistency. I've never managed to find a way to get all the chickpea chunks away, I love a chunky Houmous but every so often a silky smooth one would be nice too.
Drop the tomato soup recipe 🙏 love tomato soup
Might be this one
www.seriouseats.com/15-minute-creamy-tomato-soup-vegan-recipe
A fast and clean way is to just use an immersion blender right in the chinois. The vortex chops up the pieces that are too big to make it through the mesh.
How does the bitter blend play a hand here, does it interfere enough to be noticeable for olive oil?
Hey i got the same vitamix!
I would love to support you if you had Amazon links to various equipment you use!
Mine is on top of cabinets gathering fur. I used it 2 years ago when I made Mulligatawny.
Was this the recipe you posted on Serious Eats or have you come up with something newer?
Make a corn sauce, straining the same way. Make mini tamales, using cheese and strained detritus. Add Morita peppers and red bells to the corn sauce. Put 2 tamales into the soup and pipe the corn sauce garnish on top of the exposed bits of mini-tamales😊😊😊
Thoughts on that olive oil? I have seen some RUclips chefs promoting it and was turned off by having to order it from their website, but my local grocery store now has it.
It’s very good actually, but what I have in that bottle is a different oil now. I just like the bottle 😂
@@JKenjiLopezAltI was think about getting some and keeping the bottle as well. Hard to find a good squeezer bottle for oil that doesn’t leak.
Another really important note is to not overwhelm your blender, even a high-powered one, and ESPECIALLY a Vitamix 5200 like he has needs proper portioning. Yes, it is a powerful blender, but see how the top is really wide but the base is narrow? That's a great feature that allows you to make both larger and smaller batches of things, so it's a versatile machine for home cooks, but it means that the volumetric output from that blade is much more limited than say a Vitamix 7500 designed with a much wider base and larger blade. I personally prefer the 5200 style like Kenji's because I can get a cleaner emulsification in a small batch of something without too much air being incorporated, but the trade-off is that you need to give the blender more TIME to work. Sometimes you need to set a 2-3 minute timer for a soup and just let it rip for a while (wear noise cancelling headphones). The smaller blade at the base means that it needs more revolutions to get the same amount of work done as a blade with 4x-5x surface area. Also, because the blade has a much shorter length than a wide-base pitcher, the RPM needs to be way higher because the outer ends of the blade aren't moving nearly as fast as the ends of a blade that is several times wider. This is why it also helps to only fill your blender like 60%-65% full, especially with something viscous like a thick soup. The less weight your motor has to move around, the more RPM it can generate, and the faster the blade will be able to shred anything in its path, and you'll get a more efficient and clean output in batches than you would trying to fit it all in one go. Blade speed is your friend, not only in terms of how quickly things blend, but also how much force and ability the blender will have to break up the particles. Just my 2¢.
How do you stop the blender from whipping a lot of air into the mixture?
Put it in a vacuum pot and degas it, easy.
Generally, it'll settle out on its own unless you make a thick soup with a lot of fat or emulsifiers. Simmering it again tends to speed up the process, in my experience.
Honestly, this is a fantastic question. This is actually why Kenji's 5200 model has a narrower base, to help you combat this problem without having to make massive batches every time. The reason air gets incorporated is because of the way the liquid vortex make a funnel of air in the center. If the blender speed is high enough, that vortex of air will reach all the way down to the blade, and it will basically whip air into whatever you're blending. The wider top above the narrower base of the 5200 pitcher helps to apply more downward pressure and condense the contents, resisting the vortex and delaying the issue you're describing. The blenders with straighter, less tapered sides can blend larger batches more quickly and easily, but suffer more from this air issue.
There are basically 2 ways to influence this: speed and volume/mass. The higher the speed, the more likely that vortex of air will extend all the way down to the blades, sucking in air. However, sometimes you still need the highest speeds to get the job done, so this is where the size of the batch comes into play. If you have a super small batch, the blades easily become exposed to air because they have very little resistance from the lighter weight of the contents, so increasing the batch size helps to give the blade more work, and therefore you can rip the speed higher without exposing the blades to air. When I'm making something that will suffer from too much air incorporation (like a French custard), I carefully watch the depth of the vortex while adjusting the speed, so I know when to stop increasing it. You can also really hear the difference as well; once the vortex of air reaches the blades, there is a very distinct sloshing sound you can hear from the blades beating in the air, almost like the sound you hear when steaming latte milk and the wand tip rises above the surface.
Lastly, I said volume/mass, and not just volume alone. That's because these each affect how hard the blade/motor have to work. Depending on how heavy the contents are, you don't necessarily need a specific minimum amount of volume to avoid the "whipping" effect. If you're blending something particularly dense and viscous, you can get away with a lower volume because you have added mass, and the blender will have to work much harder to get that vortex to extend all the way down to the blades. A great example of this would be something like tahini, where I can only blend like 2 cups of it t high speed, but it is so insanely thick that the vortex can't fully develop (at least in the 5200 Vitamix). However, 2 cups of asparagus soup would go splashing all over the place at high speed.
So this is really just a LOOONG-winded way of saying that you need to play around with viscosity, ingredient amounts, and blender speeds to monitor the air issue. But being strategic about it can really help you avoid having to wait like 20 minutes for your pink tomato soup to turn back to brick red. =)
P.S. One last PRO tip? This is also why being patient in the beginning and turning up the speed slowly is so important. Ever notice how in the early stages of a full-speed blend, things are sort of bouncing up and down and you can even hear the pitch of the motor oscillating with the sloshing? But then after like 15 seconds of blending, things sort of even out, and now the top of the blending contents are super stable and the motor sound is smooth? That's because the speed was too high at the beginning, and the chunky contents were creating a lot of interference to the flow. All that sloshing around is also giving the blade plenty of opportunity to beat air into the mix. So be patient. Slowly creep up the speed for 30 seconds or so, letting more and more chunks break down without creating a sloshing in the pitcher. Then once you turn it on high, the turbulence will be much more stable and air won't get in.
How annoying is it to clean the conical fine mesh strainer out of 10?
There is surely nothing worse than washing sieves. With the possible exception of being Garth Crooks. Do you switch the kitchen light off with your chin?
Let’s put it this way: I compare everything else on a scale from 1 to conical strainer.
😂
Kenji has talked about this in another video (a few months back I believe), but basically he turns the strainer upside-down in the sink and sprays the faucet jet through it from the bottom and the outer sides. This removes most of the little bits of things, and it quickly looks quite clean. I do something similar, although I additionally like to take a softer nylon bottle brush and gently scrub inside and out; you've gotta be careful because sometimes the little strands like to get caught up in the sieve layers, but I mostly do this to remove any residual oils. Like Kenji also mentioned, there will always be little flecks and bits of "stuff" that just doesn't want to come out of the chinois, but the thought is that if they don't want to come out easily, then they probably won't come out the next time you use it and they can just live in the stainer. 🤣
It's honestly not that bad to clean given the massive benefits the food gets in terms of refinement. In reality, the real nuisance about using a conical sieve is just it's awkward shape and size; once it's been dirtied, it's not really easy to rest it somewhere without making a mess, so you just end up leaving it in the sink where it gets in the way. But chinois are lovely kitchen companions that deserve more love. :)
1oz ladle pump and dump for the win.
I wonder, won't the olive oil turn bitter if blended like that, or it takes longer than that to happen?
It’s not about length of time, it’s about aerating it and oxidizing as well as shearing it. This olive oil is way too diluted for that to happen. It really only happens if you blend pure oil or sauces witb a very high oil content (like a vinaigrette or mayo).
@@JKenjiLopezAltcould you expand on that please? wouldn’t olive oil in general be pure and not diluted?
@@dubofkushI think he means the olive oil is diluted by the soup whereas mayo is mostly going to be made up of the oil
I use an immersion blender and then strain it, because it makes clean-up easier.
In your mayo video you say not to blend olive oil is that not your opinion is? @kenji
That's true of mayonnaise but in something like this with just a small amount of olive oil vs everything else, it's fine.
How do you clean this strainer? Does it fit in your dishwasher?
Dishwashers work well, but if it won't fit, a fine bristle brush and sink sprayer will get it clean.
A fine technique that I will likely never use.
Kenji I heard somewhere on the Internet that you should never put olive oil in a blender because it shreds the molecules and makes it turn bitter. Is there any truth to that or complete myth? Or maybe it's okay when you have so many other ingredients in the blender?
It has to do more with aerating than with shredding. If you beat excess air into olive oil, the oxidation brings out a lot more bitter notes to the flavor, so making a rouille in a blender would probably be a very bad idea. But in this case, Kenji is emulsifying oil into a larger batch of an already thick soup, so there really isn't much air being incorporated at this point. Although if you were worried about the risk of air being incorporated, you could just dial down the speed a little bit, and be fine.
Just call him the zohan
Can't adding olive oil during blending add some additional bitterness from the oil?
Yes, good olive oil has sharpness and bitterness. This is a feature not a bug.
pls more vego/vegan videos
now wash it all
If you want tiny metal filings in your soup, tap the conical sieve with a chef's steel. ;)
You make a great point. Also seems like a good way to make little flat spots on the steel. Ribbed honing steels are worthless anyway. Polished steels are the way. :)
c:
"Get overly exited and blow it's top of"? 🤨
Was thinking about making this for Valentines
Step 1: buy $400 vita mix
Wait for a good sale at least. They do go on sale sometimes. I picked up a 5200 for $300 I think on a prime day last year. It's still rather steep, but more doable with a good deal.
You can also by them used. I bought a used motor for like $180, and then you can just buy a new blender cup a la cart if you are grossed out by used ones. those motors will last a home cook forever.
I used to think people who spent that kind of money on blenders were absolute suckers, but that's because I only grew up using cheap $20 blenders for things like milkshakes and smoothies, and had never seen what a quality blender could do. If you are someone who wants to try serious cooking in the kitchen, a quality blender is an amazing asset. Don't be fooled by the "all-in-one" budget brands like Ninja. Those blenders are not even the same league of product.
Who knew soup making was so noisy
First! Sorry had to...
nice 🥣
Hey Kenji pin me 📌