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Tips for Using the Instant Pot Ace Blender

While developing recipes for the Instant Pot Ace Blender Cookbook, we learned a few things about how to get the best results using the Ace blender and, in particular, how to adapt traditional recipes and existing blender recipes to work best using it. Here’s what we learned.

Forget the Normal Rules When It Comes to Ingredient Prep

For lush and creamy soups, we found that we could spare our hands a little knife work and cut ingredients into chunks. The blender’s powerful heating and blending program did the rest of the work for us perfectly. For example, in one creamy soup we cut a pound of carrots into 1½-inch chunks, saving us time. We also tossed in a whole peeled garlic clove and a chunk of peeled ginger. In chunkier soups, you have to be more precise in your chopping, cutting your ingredients to the size you want them to be in the final dish. Cutting them too large would throw off the balance of the soup.

Use the Microwave (Sometimes)

Perhaps the biggest challenge when making recipes in the Ace blender is that there is no way to brown in it to build flavor, so we needed to find a work-around. Trying to avoid additional dishes to clean, we turned to a trick we discovered when using a slow cooker: bloom spices and aromatics in the microwave with a little oil and other flavor-building ingredients like tomato paste. It takes just minutes and in some recipes made a big difference. This trick also came in handy when we were required to soften ingredients.

Adjust Texture to Avoid Scorching

Given that this is a blender that heats food to the boiling point, it is hard to avoid the fact that some ingredients, including those with high sugar or high fat content, will stick to the metal plate and potentially make a bit of a mess. This is especially true with canned tomato products. When possible we tried to thin our sauces with broth to prevent scorching but not so much so as to compromise the final texture.

Clean Your Ace Blender with Hot Water, Soap, and the Pulse/Clean Function

In general, it is easy to clean the blender by using a bottle or dishwashing brush and soapy water. Sometimes, if there is some stuck-on food or scorched food on the bottom, you will want to run the Pulse/Clean function. To use the function, simply fill the pitcher with 34 ounces of hot water and press the button. Discard the water after it has run and fill again adding a little soap this time and run the program again. Rinse with warm water to finish.