Stop Making This Dangerous Mistake With Your Blender

In my opinion, every season is soup season. You don’t need a specific time of year to enjoy a hearty bowl of roasted tomato or carrot-ginger soup, both of which are great all year long. What you definitely don’t want to do, though, is make the potentially dangerous decision to put your fresh-off-the-stove soup into the blender and hit “Purée.”

Most people wouldn’t clock putting hot soup into a blender as a potential danger, but it can be risky. Hot soup is already one of the more dangerous dishes to prepare in the kitchen, simply because it’s so easy to spill a bowl and burn yourself. That danger is amplified when you put too much hot soup into the blender, which is moving that hot liquid around at high speeds. As the soup purées and whirs around the jar, a build-up of steam can occur, and the pressure from that steam can force the lid of your blender right off!

It’s likely that the user manual for your blender specifically warns against blending hot liquids for this reason. “The heat from the ingredients can cause pressure to build up in the sealed containers, causing possible expulsion of hot ingredients which may cause personal injury or property damage,” reads the manual for my daily-driver Nutribullet. It recommends only blending ingredients at room temperature. (Cold ingredients, like frozen fruit, are also fine.)

I learned this lesson the hard way, in part because I was too impatient to wait for my soup to cool down before whirring it in the blender. I managed to escape serious injury, but it was still plenty painful to end up with tons of tiny soup splatters all over my arms. If you do manage to avoid a burn, you’re still stuck with the cleanup after a blender explosion sends soup all over your kitchen.

How To Avoid Danger

There are, fortunately, multiple ways to avoid the risk of a hot soup incident. You can blend the soup in batches, leaving room in the blender jar for the steam to rise, or use a towel to cover the hole in your blender's lid to allow the steam to vent. If you really want to play it safe, use an immersion blender, which will allow you to blend the soup directly in the pot. (And, as a bonus, you won’t have to deal with cleaning out all the nooks and crannies of your blender.)

Perhaps the easiest solution is to have a little patience. Soup is one of the good things in life that takes a little time, and a few extra minutes of cooling on the stove before you blend everything is worth the delay. I suppose that wait might be easier said than done when there’s hearty, homemade soup at stake, so maybe it is finally time to invest in an immersion blender.