Appliance Hack – One simple tip for cleaning your blender in LITERALLY seconds

January 7th, 2016

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Cleaning a blender by hand can be a time-consuming exercise in frustration. Most blender jugs tend to be tall and narrow, making it really tricky to access the bit at the base around the blades where most of the food grots tend to collect.

Oh no! The blender is all clogged up with DELICIOUS BERRIES (photo by Daniel Lee on Flickr)

Poking around with a long-handled scrubbing brush in the sink or carefully placing the blender jug in the dishwasher are both valid cleaning options, but don’t always provide reliable results in a timely fashion. And while it’s possible to disassemble some blenders to access the blades for cleaning, this too can be a fiddly and time-consuming process.

Parts of the Magic Bullet MBR-2107M Blender

Obviously, this situation Will. Not. Do. Especially if your blender’s seeing a fair bit of action, like mine did over the recent holidays. When it wasn’t mixing up ingredients for the Christmas cheesecake, it was helping us prepare tasty cocktails for the New Year.  And as the holiday season is busy enough without adding extra frustrations, we needed a fast and simple way to keep the blender clean between uses.

Luckily, working at Appliances Online means you pick up a lot of random appliance-related tips, tricks and trivia, including this tip for instantly cleaning a blender:

Don’t clean the blender – let the blender clean itself.

That’s it. Simple, right?

Pour a splash of water into the blender. Add a little detergent. Turn it on for a few seconds, sending the sudsy water whizzing around. Pour it out, and give it a rinse.

Behold – an (almost) spotless blender!

This cleaning technique doesn’t just work for the Vitamix, but pretty much any other blender as well.

To be fair, this little trick seems obvious when you think about it. Apologies to anyone who’s been doing this for years and was hoping we’d be revealing some kind of secret forbidden technique for better blender cleaning. But there’s really no need to overcomplicate a good thing.

Plus, not everyone knows about this little tip – I certainly shared it with a few new people over the holidays, and quickly became the Man of the Hour when we were making cheesecake and could instantly clear the biscuit crumbs out of the blender to immediately start combining the cream and sugar. And on New Year’s Eve, we were able to quickly switch between different cocktail recipes without traces of all of the different drink flavours combining into an unholy abomination.

Sunbeam Blender PB7620S

That said, while this technique will quickly clean and freshen up you blender enough for its next use, you may still be left with trace amounts of food residue left over, especially when working with oily or greasy ingredients. Before you pack your blender away, you should still give it a proper scrub to ensure it’s fully disinfected and antibacterially clean.

So the next time you find someone struggling to clean a blender, share this little tip and get ready to bask in the ensuing praise for your unending wisdom.