Why You Should Never Put Sun-Dried Tomatoes In The Blender
Blenders are kitchen superheroes. They look powerful with their metal blades, motors, and thunderous sounds. Plus, this wonderful kitchen asset helps save time, simplify, and speed up things while cooking. In just a couple of minutes, blenders can make amazing recipes like smoothies, soup, dips, ground spices, butter, baby food, desserts, and more. Feels like magic when you put a mix of ingredients in, and it transforms into something else. But, a fantastic utensil needs extra care so its power doesn't disappear.
Before using a blender, it's better to think if it's actually the blender's role in this: Food processors are way better to chop and shred, while the blender is better to transform things into liquid. Other mistakes while using the blender are overfilling it, or adding very hot things. But honestly, in the adrenaline of experimenting with the blender, we barely stop and think.
Perhaps, the ingredient we are using, although delicious, is damaging our utensils. Let's take sun-dried tomatoes for example. This dried intense flavored tomato is famous for enhancing spreads, pasta, salads, pesto, and even hummus, but sun-dried tomatoes might be one of your blender's kryptonite because of their texture.
Before blending sun-dried tomatoes, soak them
There are definitely certain types of food that shouldn't go in the blender because its texture can break the blender, no matter if we clean our blades thoroughly and use the blender kindly. My Recipes advises avoiding turmeric roots, almonds, ice, coffee beans, bread dough, and dried fruits. Just like any type of dried fruit, their sticky centers and thick exteriors can coat the blades, and you may feel your blender slowing down or not functioning properly, or worst: Dried fruits can ruin your blender indefinitely.
Reader's Digest says that the leathery kind of texture of sun-dried tomatoes will cause the blend to become entangled, and this won't only slow down the blades, but will give you extra work while cleaning the blender. Most times, you end up excavating the sticking parts of it in your blades with a knife, as Southern Living warns. Inspiralized founder Ali Maffucci suggested soaking the sun-dried tomatoes in water before blending with them so they get softer, especially if using an everyday blender like most of us will probably have (via Reader's Digest). But, if you are using a high-performance blender like a Vitamix — actually one of the best blenders of the year — you may avoid the problem. With this warning, we wish you a long life with your blender!