Review: Braun MultiQuick 7 Hand Blender

I remember my first-ever use of an immersion blender. I put its spinning blades directly into a pot full of cooked potatoes, onions, and leeks and removed it moments later, leaving behind a silky pureed vichyssoise.

With a motor in the handle and a spinning blade on the end of a detachable shaft, an immersion—aka a "hand" or "stick"—blender is incredibly practical. For that soup, there was no messy transfer to an upright blender, no blender jar and parts to clean, just the pint-glass sized business end of the immersion blender, which went into the dishwasher while the handle returned to the utensil drawer. It's such a smart, easy, and affordable thing that, for a while, I gave them as gifts to family members. I never even wondered about getting a "real" blender.

The immersion blender I married into is a 200-watt Braun with one button, one speed, and no visible model number. It's old enough that the cord is yellowing but solid enough that I never considered getting a new one. When the housing around its whisk attachment cracked a few years ago, I fixed it with duct tape.

Photograph: Braun

Braun's new MultiQuick 7 has a 500-watt, variable-speed motor, and it costs $100. Its ergonomic grip is like a ski pole handle with a trigger under your index finger; squeeze a little to take a slow spin, then press down harder to gradually ramp it up to full power. The blade shaft clicks on and off the handle easily. One interesting feature is something called ActiveBlade, where if the bottom of the bell-shaped guard around the blade is against the bottom of the vessel you're mixing in, you can push the blade about a quarter inch closer to the bottom of the vessel, allowing you to get any lingering bits of parsley or garlic.

I was keen to try it out, particularly as the $60 MultiQuick 5, with two speeds and 350 watts, is top-rated and an excellent value.

To test it, I used a mix of tried-and-true favorite recipes and others from a trusted source, Just Add Sauce from America's Test Kitchen.

I started by going on a green-sauce binge. If you're not too fussy, these are a real sweet spot for an immersion blender. Put barely-chopped parsley, lemon zest, capers, salt, and a few healthy glugs of olive oil in the blending cup—Braun rather charmingly calls the included cup a "beaker". Make it go buzz buzz buzz for a couple seconds, and you've got salsa verde. Sauces like chermoula, chimichurri, and persillade are all first cousins. My favorite is Simon Hopkinson's "green paste," a mix of cilantro, mint, garlic, cumin, chiles, lime juice, and cream of coconut. I love these sauces as they are surprisingly easy to make and can dress up a wide range of foods, like roasted vegetables, grilled steak, pasta, chicken, rice, and fish.

Photograph: Braun

While recipes for herb sauces like these often call for a food processor, a countertop blender, or a mortar and pestle, those methods can turn into projects with attendant messes. With an immersion blender, you put everything in the blending cup that comes with the blender, lean into it, pull the trigger, and you've got sauce that you can store in the vessel you made it in. Will it have the nuanced flavor of having pounded out the herbs' essential oils with a mortar and pestle? Perhaps not. Can you control how finely the ingredients are chopped as you could if you were using a food processor? Not quite. But you'll be far more likely to whip up a small batch, and you can do it so quickly that you won't care. Once you’ve made one a couple of times and feel confident enough to eyeball your quantities, you can make them in about the same amount of time it takes to get the ingredients out of the fridge.

Next, I went classic and made mayo. Here, an immersion blender is perfect. I haven't always felt this way; years ago, I tried making mayo with another immersion blender, and it just wouldn't set. It got so bad I called my mom for help. (Her sage advice? "Pitch it and start over.")

With the MultiQuick there was no need to call Mom. I mixed two egg yolks in the beaker with lemon juice, salt, and Dijon, then slowly added the oil. Together, the mixture and I went through several phases as I blended—doubt, weightlessness, more doubt, and "what the?!?"—before finally snapping to in a marvel of emulsification.

I later took advantage of the ActiveBlade feature, getting the blade closer to the bottom to make a batch of mayo with just one yolk, just about the smallest amount you can practically make. I used the mayo on sandwiches, coated a strip steak with it to get an excellent sear on the grill, and added garlic to it for a quick version of an allioli to accompany a Catalan noodle dish.

From there, it was a logical segue into hollandaise, that blissful blend of butter, egg, and lemon. Here, with an ATK recipe that calls for hot, melted butter and a clear winner of an appliance, I could immediately move into thinking about the finer points of a recipe, like the consistency of the hollandaise and the amount of lemon in it, and worry less about whether it would work at all.

I blasted through more. Green goddess dressing, chock full of herbs and anchovies, was fantastic on a green salad with bacon bits. I whipped up a kalamata olive and rosemary dressing where the rosemary was a bit woody, the olives should have been chopped, and the garlic should have been minced, but I just leaned on it for a bit and it came out as silky as if I used a fancy countertop blender. A lamb vindaloo sauce, with a blend of onion, garlic, chile, and spices, was lovely over rice.

From Joe Yonan's fantastic new cookbook, Cool Beans, I made a humma-noush, a clever mix of hummus and baba ghanoush (Yonan's version was inspired by chef Ron Pickarski), and the immersion blender cut right through without effort. With the MultiQuick's smart blend of power and design, none of the recipes gave the machine the slightest pause.

Later, I used the whisk attachment to make whipped cream, which worked just fine, and to blend some chocolate cake batter, which I'd call "fine in a pinch." There are other attachments you can get with it, but the bare-bones blender, beaker, and whisk option (which also comes with the mini food processor attachment that I’ve found surprisingly useful) is the one you want.

The Braun MQ7 is a great immersion blender that's well designed, powerful, and comfortable. The problems I encountered with it weren't really problems. I didn't find variable speed all that useful, for example—high and low would have been plenty. You could also save $40 and get the MultiQuick 5. Either way, you'll be sitting pretty.

I did go back to the beginning, so to say, and made a big pot of vichyssoise, plunging the blender right into the pot on the stovetop (any immersion blender's best trick) and pureeing the cooked potatoes, leeks, and onions without a hitch. It reminded me that while a regular blender can be a bit of a fringe item in the kitchen, an immersion blender's combination of utility, cost, and ease to clean makes one—and especially the MultiQuick 7—essential.