Beware, denizens of the kitchen. Your immersion blender, as fine a tool as it may be, cannot do everything. I learned this the hard way.
I wasn't really keen on the thing in the first place. My husband bought it. Guys like gadgets. Yes, perhaps that's an unfair stereotype. But we are talking about a man who has a digital thermometer for his smoker that lets him monitor the temperature from inside the house. Moreover, storage space is limited in our kitchen and anything we add really has to earn the space it occupies. So I started out as an immersion blender skeptic.
It took a while to win me over to Team Immersion. But the first time I used it to make a ginger/garlic/Panko paste, it was almost a religious experience. Something that could take 10 minutes of chopping and then mushing with a mortar and pestle was done in under a minute. And unlike using a regular food processor, it was exactly the consistency I wanted. And it was far easier to clean than a food processor. After that, the sky seemed the limit. Creamy soup? You bet. Cauliflower rice? A snap.
After such a great start, what went wrong? Mashed potatoes, that's what. It's a simple food to make with a hand mixer, but the immersion blender was already out on the counter. So I decided to experiment.
No experiment is a failure if it yields useful data. The data I gleaned from this effort was that the immersion blender doesn't incorporate air into the mashed potatoes. They were so gluey that I could have used them to spackle holes in the wall. The potatoes were edible, barely. But it's embarrassing to screw up something so simple, when you've been cooking for decade. Readers, learn from my mistake. Unless you really need some spackle...
