How to Make Sauces in a Blender
Fresh, homemade sauce adds a special touch to your favorite recipes. Whether you’re topping an eggs benedict with hollandaise or layering homemade marinara and pasta to create a delicious lasagna, you can use your blender to mix up a variety of sauce recipes. Use this guide to learn how to make sauces in a blender and get inspired with breakfast and dinner sauce recipes.
Making Sauces in the Blender
Your blender can open your kitchen to countless sauce possibilities. Read on below to learn the basics for making sauce with your blender. Then, with these tips and tricks in mind, customize your own recipes with fresh ingredients and spices.
TOOLS
Blender, like the KitchenAid® High Performance Series Blender
Knife
- Cutting board
- Baking sheet (optional)
- Pot or saucepan (optional)
Step 1. Clean and prep your ingredients
Depending on the type of sauce you’re making, you may have fresh produce that needs a quick clean before you can begin your sauce preparation. Once you’ve cleaned any produce, you can begin prepping other ingredients like quartering large vegetables or fruits, peeling garlic or shredding cheese.
Step 2. Roast or saute ingredients (optional)
For sauces like marinara, sriracha or ranchero sauce, you typically roast or saute the vegetables with the aromatics like onions and garlic to give your sauce its rich flavor before adding the ingredients to your blender. This is not necessary for all sauce recipes, so you may be able to skip this step depending on the type of sauce you’re making.
Step 3. Add ingredients to your blender
Fill the blender pitcher with your ingredients starting with liquids and ending with any hard or frozen ingredients. Secure the lid tightly onto the blender jar to prevent spills and splatters while your blender is powered on.
Step 4. Start the blender
Select the speed needed for your ingredients on the blender control panel or knob. Allow your mixture to blend until it reaches your desired consistency.
On select KitchenAid® blenders, you can enjoy the versatility of variable blending speeds that allow you to customize the texture of your sauce.
Breakfast Sauces to Make in the Blender
You can use your blender to whip up some classic breakfast sauce recipes or discover new sauces to top your favorite breakfast dishes. Read on below to get inspired.
Hollandaise Sauce
Your blender can help you create rich and creamy hollandaise sauce that pairs beautifully with poached eggs, smoked salmon or even roasted asparagus.
Though hollandaise is known to break easily, using a blender to continuously mix the sauce helps to create the signature velvety texture.
Ranchero sauce
Give breakfast a spicy kick when you use your blender to puree red chiles, garlic, chicken broth and seasonings to create this classic ranchero sauce.
The sharp blades of your blender help you easily achieve a silky smooth texture for your ranchero sauce that can be used to make breakfast classics like huevos rancheros.
Strawberry raspberry sauce
Add this sweet and savory homemade topping to bacon or oatmeal for an extra kick with breakfast. Roasted vegetables are combined with fresh fruits and spices inside your blender to create a sauce that will surprise your taste buds.
Dinner Sauces to Make in the Blender
Serving an elegant dinner topped with homemade sauce adds an extra special touch, no matter what cuisine you’re experimenting with. Get inspired with recipes that use a blender to create classic dinner sauces.
Pesto Sauce
Cheese, basil, garlic, pine nuts and olive oil come together inside your blender to create this classic, colorful sauce that is concentrated with flavor.
Though pesto is commonly made using a food processor or mortar and pestle, your blender can also help you easily create this herbaceous sauce so you have more time to spend making homemade pasta to pair with your pesto.
Bearnaise Sauce
You can use your blender to puree a delicious bearnaise sauce that you can use to top a holiday roast or steaks fresh off the grill. Simply bring white wine vinegar, white wine, shallots and herbs to a boil then allow it to simmer until it has reduced. Let the mixture cool before slowly stirring in egg yolks. Add this mixture to your blender and press start. While it is blending, slowly add melted butter to your sauce and continue blending until smooth.
Marinara Sauce
Classic homemade marinara is a pantry staple that requires simple ingredients and can be served with calzones and stromboli, tossed with pasta or baked with goat cheese to create a delicious dip for crusty breads. You can use your blender to create this traditional red sauce and explore the different blender speeds to customize your sauce’s texture.
You can use your KitchenAid® stand mixer with 3-Piece Pasta Roller & Cutter Set to experiment with making fresh pastas to pair with the marinara you made from scratch.
Garlic Parmesan Dressing
Garlic, chicken stock, parmesan cheese and dijon mustard are the stars in this flavorful dressing/marinade recipe. When you make this sauce in your blender you can skip the task of finely chopping your garlic cloves so you can focus on creating the other dishes for your meal.
Chimichurri Sauce
The tartness of this sauce is a flavorful complement for a variety of juicy meat dishes. You can make this herbaceous sauce with the help of your blender so you can quickly create this sauce to add a zesty topping to steak, tacos, rice bowls and even scrambled eggs.
Sriracha Hot Sauce
Your blender plays a crucial role in creating this fermented garlic and chili sauce as it helps to create thick consistency sriracha is known for. Blend up homemade sriracha to add a spicy kick to your favorite dishes.
Tahini Sauce
You can use your blender to puree sesame seeds and olive oil to create this creamy and savory sauce from scratch. This tahini can then be used to make hummus, cookies or even homemade salad dressings as in the recipe below.
Blender Sauce Tips
You can thicken a watery sauce by adding flour, a cornstarch slurry, tomato paste or butter depending on the recipe you’re using, or heat the sauce to evaporate some of the excess liquid.
If your sauce is too thick, you can simply blend in more of the recipe’s cooking liquid (milk, water, broth, wine etc.).
- Sometimes during the cooking process, sauces can separate. You can make an adjustment by blending in an additional measurement of the recipe’s cooking liquid.
Best Blenders for Sauce Making
Whether you're looking to whip up a chunky tomato sauce or create a silky tahini, you’ll want a blender with a powerful motor, variable speed settings and large capacity jar. These features allow you to customize the texture and consistency of your sauce to your desired taste.
Select KitchenAid® blenders offer features like the 4 Part Blending System designed to handle tough ingredients, a Thermal Control Jar that can heat your sauce as it’s blending or a Removable Ingredient Measuring Cap so you can incorporate additional ingredients as your sauce is blending.
Shop all KitchenAid® blenders
Whether you’re blending sauces, batter, soups or smoothies, KitchenAid® blenders are designed to create smooth results. Explore the entire line of blenders from KitchenAid brand to find the right fit for your kitchen.
