The FRESKO 4-in-1 Immersion Hand Blender is a 1000-watt corded stick blender that runs $79.99 with a whisk, a 500ml chopper and a 24-ounce beaker in the box. A hand blender is the one piece of kitchen gear I never got around to buying for myself, so when FRESKO sent one along with the vacuum sealer I reviewed last month, I got to find out what I had been missing. One thing to know before ordering: the cord keeps it in the kitchen, limiting my ability to use it outside while grilling and tailgating.
The FRESKO 4-in-1 Immersion Hand Blender, model H9-DE, is $79.99 direct from FRESKO against an $89.99 list price, and it is also available on Amazon.com. FRESKO lists a 1-year warranty, so it is worth pricing both sellers before you order.
Most of the decisions on a first stick blender get made before you ever look at a specific model, and they are not the ones the box talks about.
- You blend the soup in the pot it cooked in - nothing gets ladled into a countertop jar in batches, which removes both the burn risk and the stack of dishes that stops most guys making blended soup at all.
- Buy for the attachment you will use and ignore the piece count - a four-piece kit only beats a bare wand if you have something to do with the extras, and if all you ever want is smooth soup then they are three more things to store.
- A tall narrow vessel works better than a wide bowl - an immersion blender pulls food down into the blade and pushes it back up the sides, and that circulation only happens when the walls are close. It is why the beaker ships in the box instead of being an upsell.
- Keep the blade fully submerged before you pull the trigger - the guard around the blade only contains the splash while it is under the surface, and a stick blender lifted mid-blend will redecorate the kitchen.
- Unplug it before you swap attachments or reach into the bowl - the trigger sits on the handle you are holding, and there is no lid between your hand and the blade the way there is on a countertop blender.
This is the second piece of FRESKO gear to land here. The V8 sealer that came with it is the other end of the scale, a sixteen-inch stainless machine that needs a permanent home on the counter. This one costs fifty dollars less and asks for no counter space.
The kit is four pieces around one motor body: the blending wand, a whisk, a 500ml chopper with its own lidded bowl, and a 24-ounce measuring beaker with a cover. The blades are titanium-coated stainless steel; the motor has an overheat cutoff, and the speed comes off a pressure-sensitive trigger rather than a dial, so you feather it the way you would a drill.
A cordless stick blender can run up to $100 for the blender alone, no whisk, no chopper, no beaker. The corded four-piece kit costs less and puts three more things in the box, and cordless is the upgrade you make later if you turn out to be using it constantly, on long blends and tougher ingredients.
That is not where I am. What I wanted was soups and sauces, which sit at the low end of what any of these can do, and paying twenty dollars more to lose three attachments would have been a bad trade.
I Ran A Bowl Of Garden Salsa Through The FRESKO Chopper
For my first test I made salsa: tomatillos, tomatoes, onion and garlic, straight into the 500ml chopper bowl. Garden fresh salsa tastes so much better than store-bought, and raw veggies have that crisp taste of summer that salsa in the jar can just never match.
The chopper doing that work is a 500ml bowl with a removable blade that the motor drives from above. This is one thing I didn't really expect to find in this product - the motor is the expensive part and now it's used for whisking, chopping, blending, all sorts of stuff depending on what's at the end of the wand. In this case, It handled about two cups of vegetables, perfect for salsa for a few people, or a rub, or a handful of nuts, that is the right size.
This small size and multi-use make it a great gift for new homeowners or graduation gifts for guys that might have small apartment kitchens or want to chop and blend but tuck it away in their dorm room closet.
A Stick Blender Gives You More Control Over What You're Working On
A countertop blender has one setting that matters: on. Everything in the jar goes through the blade the same number of times, so it's great at smooth and close to useless at halfway. The FRESKO wand is the opposite arrangement. The blade is on the end of something you are holding, so you choose which part of the pot gets hit and for how long. Pulse it four times and you have texture. Work it around for thirty seconds and you have puree.
That's not to say that you can't do a perfectly blended creamy soup with this (you can and immersion blenders do a fantastic job at that since you can bring the soup or sauce to a simmer and then blend things to creamy perfection). However, for situations like the squash I made the other night where I wanted to have some "saucey" and other parts "chunky" so I could mix it together for a hearty and healthy pasta sauce ... this was perfect since I could control what got blended.
On the other hand, when making a batch of my "Summer Squash Sauce," the Blendtec Blender works great to puree it down with the basil and cheese, etc. That's a different style of cooking.
Similarly, while FRESKO says it can chop ice ... I don't see myself making frozen margaritas and daiquiris as I do with my countertop blender ... but it did chop the softer nugget ice from my machine into a sort of snowcone.
I Really Wish This Was Cordless :(
I made that bowl of salsa outdoors, on the side table of the grill, with the FRESKO plugged in and the cord running off the table. That is the corded compromise in one picture.
What I wanted was to work at the grill the way you work at a counter: whip up salsa while something cooks, put a rub together, and handle whatever comes up without walking back into the kitchen. On a cord, how much of that you get depends entirely on where your outlets are. The same problem shows up anywhere the cooking has left the house. Fresh salsa at a tailgate, chopped nuts and then fresh whipped cream at a summer picnic, both attachments in the bag and nothing to plug into.
If that is your use case, this is not the one to buy, and the $100 cordless with nothing in the box starts looking like the smarter money. Indoors and plugged in, it does everything I got it for.
This Is A Great Product To Buy As It Is An Affordable Option For A Whole Bunch Of Blending Uses
The FRESKO is easy to live with because everything except the motor body comes apart for cleaning. The wand, whisk and chopper components can be rinsed or put in the dishwasher, while the motor body simply wipes down. That quick cleanup is a big part of why I would grab this for salsa, soup or a small sauce instead of pulling out the full-size blender.
The one thing I cannot judge yet is long-term blade durability. FRESKO uses titanium-coated stainless steel blades, but I do not know how well that coating and edge will hold up after months of acidic foods and dishwasher cycles. The 1-year warranty provides some protection, but I will be watching it as I keep using it.
At $79.99, though, this feels like a good first immersion blender because it lets you figure out how much you will actually use one without spending $100 on a cordless blender by itself. You may find yourself using the wand twice a week and eventually decide cordless is worth the upgrade. Or you may find that salsa, soups and sauces are all you ever need it for, in which case this four-piece kit already does the job.
FRESKO also offers a 30-day risk-free trial with free returns on direct purchases. That gives you a couple weekends of real cooking to figure out whether the wand, whisk and chopper actually earn space in your kitchen.
For current pricing and availability, check Amazon.com.