Cleaning

The ninety-second clean

By Robin Marsh · Everyday Blender

Ask people why the blender lives in the cupboard and almost nobody says they lost interest. They say some version of "it's a hassle to clean."

It's the most common complaint in the category, by a distance. Not the motor, not the noise, not the recipes. The washing up. And it's entirely fixable, because a blender is one of the very few kitchen tools that cleans itself, if you let it.

The method

The second you pour, add warm water. Fill the jug about halfway, and add one drop of dish soap. Not a squeeze. A drop.
Run it on high for thirty seconds. The blades scrub themselves and every surface the smoothie touched.
Rinse and rack. Dump the soapy water, rinse once, leave it upside down on the drying rack. Done.

The whole trick is the timing. Do it before anything dries. Dried smoothie is cement. Wet smoothie is a rinse.

The two mistakes that make cleaning miserable

Waiting until later. "Later" is where blenders go to die. Once the pulp dries into the blade housing and the grooves, you're into soaking and scrubbing territory, and after a few rounds of that, the cupboard wins. The ninety-second clean only works in the first two minutes.

The dishwasher. It feels easier and it's usually slower: you wait a full cycle to use the jug again, hot cycles age the seals and can cloud the jug, and the blade base often isn't dishwasher-safe anyway. Thirty seconds of self-cleaning beats a day in the machine.

If yours already has dried buildup: warm water, a proper squeeze of soap this time, and let it sit for ten minutes before the thirty-second blend. For stains and smells, blend a cup of water with a tablespoon of baking soda. For cloudy jugs, white vinegar and warm water, left for an hour.

That's it. Ninety seconds, no tools, and the biggest reason blenders get abandoned is gone. Next up: why your smoothie doesn't keep you full, which is the second biggest.