For her latest book, she has added to that list.
Before she mentions even a single recipe in “Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share With People You Love — A Cookbook,” Nosrat shares a spread of her “unexpectedly essential” kitchen gear, which includes one piece she used to dread but now adores: the immersion blender.
Nosrat’s culinary career began at Chez Panisse, where she worked her way up from food runner to cook over two years. Nosrat was often on soup duty at Alice Waters’ acclaimed Berkeley, California, bistro, which was a trailblazer in the farm-to-table movement.
“We’d use the immersion blender as the first step, then we’d have you transfer it into a smaller, normal-sized Vitamix blender, batch by batch, to get the smoothest, satin-iest texture,” Nosrat told CNN. “I had a vendetta against the immersion blender, because if I’m going to have to transfer it into the Vitamix countertop blender to puree it anyway, why bother? It took forever and felt like this huge burden to do this for 10-to-15-gallon pots of soup.”
At home, you’re making much less soup, Nosrat conceded, but those messy, fussy memories were hard for her to erase. For years, every time she saw an immersion blender, she would have a visceral reaction. “I had this dread in my stomach,” she said. “The idea of blending a soup was restaurant-sized dread, even when it was applied to a home-sized meal.”
All of that changed when Nosrat realized she could skip a step. Frustrated after one too many countertop blender mishaps spilling on her clothes or spraying the contents onto the ceiling, Nosrat decided to stick with the stick blender while developing a recipe for butternut squash and green curry soup.
“I’m just at home and not trying to serve this to people in fine dining circumstances, so I figured it might be fine. It was, and that single recipe changed everything,” Nosrat said.
In fact, the immersion blender breakthrough was so impactful that Nosrat decided to pay tribute to that creation with the Curried Carrot and Coconut Soup that stars in her latest cookbook (recipe below).
“Once I realized that creamy soup does just fine with the immersion blender only, it felt like a liberation,” she added.
As soon as the handheld blender was back in her good graces, Nosrat discovered two more stellar uses: for whipping up quick mayos and salad dressings.
“I have grown to love using it for making a small amount of an emulsion,” she said, referring to the process of mixing two liquids that normally don’t like to combine.
Want to try it out? Round up a small mason jar, add an egg, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and 1 cup of a neutral-flavored oil, and blitz. In less than a minute, you have mayonnaise.
“If I were doing it by hand, I’d have to invest a ton of time and energy to whisk it,” Nosrat said. “Using a narrow jar and the immersion blender, it comes together quickly and easily since the blade is small and the ingredients are much closer together and more compressed than they would be in a large bowl.”
The same secret comes in clutch for salad dressings such as a Caesar or the creamy oregano dressing in “Good Things.” Besides being quick and easy to emulsify, “the idea that I can make the dressing in the same jar that I store it in has been a revelation for me,” she added. Just add a lid and pop any extra in the refrigerator for tomorrow.
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