The Breville Control Grip Immersion Blender (BSB510XL) is the immersion blender to buy if you care about your cookware. Almost every stick blender is sold on motor watts; this one is designed around the part that touches the pan. Its bell-shaped base is stated to be both anti-suction and non-scratch, and those two words describe the two most annoying things about using a stick blender in a real pot.
What anti-suction actually solves
Press an ordinary stick blender against the bottom of a pot and it can clamp itself down: the blade evacuates the liquid beneath the guard, the vacuum holds it in place, and the blender stops circulating soup entirely while making a great deal of noise. You lift it, it splashes, you put it back, it happens again.
Breville’s bell is shaped to keep liquid flowing through rather than sealing against the base, which means the blender keeps pulling soup down and pushing it out sideways. The practical effect is that a pot of soup blends evenly in one pass instead of needing to be chased around, and that you spend less time with the head near the surface, which is where spatter and burns come from.
Non-scratch is not a small thing
Most kitchens make soup in whatever large pot they own, and increasingly that pot is non-stick or enamelled. A bare stainless guard spinning against that surface leaves marks, and once the coating is scored the pan’s life is measurably shorter. Breville states a non-scratch base for exactly this reason, and among the blenders we rank it and the KitchenAid’s removable pan guard are the two answers to the problem.
The 280-watt question
Breville publishes 280 watts, which is mid-pack here — the All-Clad Stainless Steel Immersion Blender publishes 600 and the MuellerLiving Ultra-Stick 500W Immersion Blender publishes 500. For soup, sauce, smoothies and puree, 280 watts is entirely sufficient; you would only feel the difference on genuinely thick, starchy or fibrous mixtures. At a generous 3 minutes a day, 365 days a year it works out to about $0.89 a year in electricity, which is the correct amount of attention to give the number.
Who it is for.Anyone who makes soup in a non-stick or enamelled pot, or who has been irritated by a blender suction-locking to the base. Anyone blending thin liquids in a stainless pot is paying for a design advantage they will not notice — read the budget roundup instead.
Where it gives up ground
Price, mainly: it costs several times the MuellerLiving Ultra-Stick 500W Immersion Blender, which publishes nearly double the wattage and includes whisk and chopper attachments too. It is also a corded, comparatively heavy unit — comfortable in the hand thanks to the grip it is named for, but not the one to buy if you want something light and cordless. And on raw motor power for the thickest jobs, the All-Clad’s published 600 watts is simply more.
The other consideration is the attachment set. The Breville ships with a blending shaft, a whisk and a chopper jug, which is a good spread — but the Braun MultiQuick 7 (MQ7035X) adds a full food processor bowl, which for some kitchens replaces a separate appliance entirely.
How we picked
Tools we claim to have lab-tested: 0
Every site in this category tells you they ran twenty machines through a lab. We have not, and we say so. Here is what we do instead: read the manufacturer's manual and spec sheet, record the published bowl capacity, motor rating, blade and disc counts and materials, cross-check the warranty against the manufacturer's own warranty document, and cite all of it so you can check the work. Prices come live from Amazon's API and disappear rather than go stale.
The scores above are judgments from that documented research — not test results. The full rubric, including what disqualifies a product, is published in full.
