How to choose the best blender for soups

The use of a heating system is essential for the preparation of hot liquid diets like steaming soups. Boilers, steamers, and heaters are virtual kitchen appliances to have on hand for tasks such as blending soups and smoothies, cooking vegetables, and brewing hot beverages. 

Nonetheless, you can use blenders to churn out hot beverages and soups. But how do you decide on the ideal blender? Here, we’ve compiled some great reviews of the top blenders for making soups and sauces, as well as those that can be used to steam hot water for making tea or any other liquid-based diet, to make your search for a blender to steam soup or liquids easier. 

Our review also features some helpful buyer’s guidelines that will assist you in selecting the best blender or mixer for your needs and price range. 

Blender vs. food processor: Which should you purchase? 

Despite some overlap in their capabilities, blenders and food processors are not interchangeable kitchen appliances. A countertop blender is superior for preparing purees, quick sauces, and emulsions (such as mayonnaise and vinaigrette). It is the only appliance that can transform fibrous fruits and vegetables into a silky texture. Because the blender jar is typically narrow and angled at the bottom, it generates a vortex that helps ingredients pass through the blades more frequently than in a food processor, resulting in smoother textures. 

With some effort, you can also puree wet ingredients (such as tomatoes for sauce) in a food processor, but the doughnut-shaped container does not handle liquids as well as the blender jar; it tends to leak. A food processor works well with thick purees, such as hummus, and sauces with a coarser texture, such as pesto.  

However, it can’t make a good smoothie, and because you can’t control the speed of the blades, it’s likely to spray hot soup everywhere. For chopping, slicing, and grating, a food processor is preferable. With the proper attachment, it is capable of mixing and kneading dough. Food processors are frequently used for chopping vegetables. Still, they are also indispensable for grating cheese, slicing potatoes for a gratin, grinding fresh breadcrumbs, and cutting butter into flour to make pie dough. 

Which blender should you purchase? 

A countertop blender produces the smoothest smoothies, daiquiris, soups, and sauces of any blender type available for purchase. It is more versatile than a personal blender, primarily designed for smoothies, due to its larger capacity and ability to handle hot liquids. It is also more potent than an immersion blender, which helps puree soups directly in the pot or whip up a quick mayonnaise but does not produce the velvety textures of a quality countertop blender. 

In general, the performance and durability of a blender are proportional to its price. Cheap blenders are incapable of pureeing the thickest mixtures without overheating, whereas expensive blenders are designed to do so. The best option is a full-size, high-powered blender if you want a kitchen workhorse that can handle everything from hot soups and sauces to thick frozen concoctions. How much you should spend on one depends on its intended purpose. 

How To Choose The Best Blender For Soups 

Since 2012, we have researched or evaluated nearly every respectable household blender, ranging from $40 budget models to $700 high-performance models. In all our testing, we’ve determined that the following blender characteristics are the most important: 

Jar shape and motor strength 

A superior blender should be able to process harsh ingredients such as fibrous kale, frozen berries, and ice without overheating the motor. How efficiently a blender accomplishes this depends on a combination of blade length and position, mixing jar shape, and motor power. Combining these three elements creates a vortex that pulls food down around the blade. 

According to our testing, tall, tapered jars with a curved bottom produce a more consistent vortex than short, wide jars with a flat bottom. However, there is a trade-off for the improved blending that a taller, tapered jar provides: A fully assembled blender may not fit beneath low-hanging cabinets. Wide, short-jarred blenders are more convenient for countertop storage, but their performance suffers. 

A stronger motor also helps to create a better vortex and blends thicker mixtures more easily. But the power rating of a blender is difficult to obtain. Most blender manufacturers advertise only “peak horsepower,” a misleading metric for determining a motor’s power. To overcome inertia, an engine operates at peak horsepower for a fraction of a second when the blender is turned on. Immediately after that, the motor returns to its “rated horsepower,” or the maximum amount of power it can produce without overheating. According to the website Cooking for Engineers, you can approximate a blender’s rated horsepower by dividing its wattage by 746. (Because 746 watts equals approximately one unit of electrical horsepower). This equation does not account for efficiency, but it provides a more accurate approximation of the power output of a blender. 

Jar material 

Most blenders we’ve tested have plastic jars. All our picks have jars made of Tritan plastic, which is BPA-free and highly durable. Many of the low-end blenders we’ve evaluated do not advertise the material of their jars beyond “BPA-free.” However, most of these jars are likely made of polycarbonate, a material that is more rigid than Tritan but highly durable. These jars should not be placed in the dishwasher because both materials will break if subjected to extreme heat. 

We understand that some folks prefer metal or glass jars. However, locating a powerful blender with a glass jar would be difficult, and there is likely a good reason for this. As April Jones explains in her article on Cooking for Engineers, glass is not the safest option for professional-grade blenders due to the high-speed blades and high horsepower motors. If a metal object, such as a spoon or knife, were left inadvertently in the blender, the glass pitcher could shatter and cause injury. Using polycarbonate plastics or polyester to avoid the danger of broken glass is a much safer alternative.” The opaque nature of stainless-steel jars allows us to observe the progress of purees and emulsification without removing the lid. 

Price 

According to buyer reviews, the holy grail for many home cooks appears to be a $50 or $100 blender with performance comparable to a $500 Vitamix or Blendtec. However, this is not possible. High-end blenders with a price tag of $150 or more, also known as high-performance blenders, offer more power, produce much smoother textures, and typically last much longer than low-end blenders priced at less than $100. Also, high-performance blenders can perform tasks you would never attempt with a low-quality blender, such as making peanut butter or milling grains. 

However, if you understand its limitations, there is nothing wrong with a cheap blender. Some individuals desire a moderately priced blender for the occasional daiquiri or smoothie. With the understanding that, in general, you get what you pay for, we have evaluated blenders spanning a wide price range. 

Warranty 

We’ve found that the most common complaint about inexpensive blenders is that their motors burn out quickly and their jars crack or leak. However, even high-end blenders can burn out. In an interview for our 2012 guide, Lisa McManus, executive editor in charge of equipment testing at Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country magazines, told our writer Seamus Bellamy, “Blenders have a tough job to do in that small space.  

The motor’s size is limited. If you require them to perform difficult daily tasks, many of them will become exhausted. It puts a lot of strain on a small machine.” Therefore, a lengthy warranty is essential, mainly if you spend a lot of money on a blender.  

All Vitamix, Oster, and Cleanblend models include a five- to seven-year warranty. At least for Vitamix machines, we’ve read numerous owner reviews stating that the blender lasts much longer. This level of performance cannot be expected from dirt-cheap blenders, which is likely why most of them come with only one-year limited warranties. 

Speed control 

Whether a blender has manual controls or pre-programmed functions is a matter of personal preference. However, we value a strong blender with a straightforward interface that includes an on/off switch, a pulse button, and a variable-speed dial. These precise controls allow you to adjust the machine’s speed quickly or turn it off if things get messy. 

If you want to multitask in the kitchen while blending, preset programs for making smoothies, blending soups, and crushing ice can be helpful. We’ve also discovered that these functions rarely produce smooth purees when manually controlling the speed and time. 

Tamper 

Our years of testing have revealed that a tamper—a small plastic bat that allows you to push food down into the blades—distinguishes the best blenders from the rest. Air pockets tend to form around the blade when a blender operates at total capacity. A tamper allows you to eliminate these air pockets without stopping the blender. If the lid is on, the tamper that comes with a blender is designed to clear the blades of that model safely. Using a different tamper or another instrument that could collide with the moving blades is hazardous and could cause damage to the machine. If your blender does not come with a tamper, you must turn the device off, remove the jar from the base, and stir the mixture with a spoon to eliminate air pockets. 

Why, then, do not all blenders include a tamper? Because forcing frozen and thick mixtures into the blades strains the motor significantly. Performance blenders with tampers have engines that can withstand this stress because they are designed for it. However, cheaper blender motors are weaker. If they included tampers, people would likely push these machines beyond their limits, causing the motor to overheat. 

How we tested 

We evaluated how well each model blended common ingredients for thick frozen smoothies and hot soups. Additionally, we were interested in finding the best blenders for making mayonnaise (eggs and oil) and nut butter (nuts, oil, and water). We churned out thick green smoothies in each blender with frozen bananas and berries, kale, and coconut water.  

We evaluated each blender’s ability to generate a stable vortex without overworking the motor or necessitating extra liquid. Following a brief taste test to assess the smoothies’ overall texture, we strained the remaining mixture through a fine-mesh sieve to examine how thoroughly the blenders had broken down the tricky greens and berry seeds. 

Since a blender’s emulsifying power is crucial when creating emulsified sauces like mayonnaise, hollandaise, vinaigrettes, and Caesar dressing, we put each model through its pace by blending a single egg yolk into mayonnaise. To make mayonnaise, hollandaise, or Caesar dressing in a blender, the blades must be positioned so that they begin whipping the egg yolk even before you add the oil. 

We ground raw peanuts into peanut butter to test the motors’ ability to process thick purees. We had our finalists mix some pia Coladas to test their slushie-making abilities. 

We also considered how simple or complicated it was to detach and reconnect the jars to the bases, how loud the motors were, whether any of the models emitted a burning odor when in use, and how straightforward the user interfaces were.