I recently purchased a stick blender. The mechanism suctions itself to the bottom of the pot and it’s pretty hard to move the thing around. If I tilt it so I can move it around then I get splashed with hot soup. How do I properly use an immersion blender?

This was a question that came up recently during our weekly live chat, where we help you level up your skills in the kitchen. Here’s how to use an immersion blender without splashing.

Also know as stick or hand blenders, “immersion blenders are designed to create a sort of vortex and pull food under the blade and then out,” recipes editor Becky Krystal wrote in her guide to the handy tool. So that suction is completely normal.

The key to avoiding splashing is to keep the blade submerged in whatever it is that you’re blending as you move the stick around until you’ve achieved your desired consistency. To accomplish that, you have three options:

• Lift the blender ever so slightly off the bottom of the pot. This can require a moderate amount of strength in shallow depths because of the powerful suction of the tool. A little tilting is okay for maneuvering it around, but try to keep the stick blender as perpendicular to the bottom of the container as possible to keep from spraying food all over the place.
• Carefully tilt the pot instead of the blender. This creates more depth with the food, making it easier for both the blender to stay submerged and to keep it from suctioning itself to the bottom of the pot. However, tilting a large pot full of hot food can be a risky scenario, so I’d recommend this to only the most adept cooks.
• Perhaps the easiest solution: Move the food to a smaller pot or container before blending — for example, pour soup from a Dutch oven into a 4- or 5-quart saucepan. The soup will come higher up the blender, giving you more depth to work with and less opportunity for splashing. The downside here, of course, is that you now have another pot to wash.

One final tip to combat splashing: The container you’re blending in should be at least a few inches taller than the food. This will help guard against food ending up on your stove, your kitchen walls and you.

Recipes for your immersion blender

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