Crushed Ice

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Restaurants, hotels and hospitals have special machines that churn Crushed Ice out. You can't really buy Crushed Ice as a consumer; you have to make it at home.

Blender

Don't use a blender that has a plastic jug instead of a glass one. The ice will make the plastic cold and fragile, and then the battering from the ice cubes will likely finish the job and shatter the plastic jug.

The performance all depends on your blender. If you have a bargain-basement blender, which granted is perfectly fine for every other thing you will do, you may risk burning its motor out if you try to crush ice with it. Or, it won't have enough oomph to do anything but round the corners off your ice cubes. Ideally, to satisfactorily crush ice and not ruin your blender, the motor on the blender should be at least 400 watts. Some higher-end blenders now advertise their ice crushing abilities; some even have designated buttons for fine or coarse crushed ice. Some blenders even have optional ice crushing canisters that you can purchase and attach. Many of these attachments are made of stainless steel, which are even safer than glass.

The smaller the ice cubes you start with, the better the results you will get. Some people find that with their less-powerful blenders, they are best to crush the ice manually a bit at first to make the pieces smaller. Don't pack the ice too tightly into the blender's jug, or put in too many ice cubes -- they need to be able to jump around in the jug. Most blenders will crush ice better if you either put a little water in with the ice cubes, or let the ice cubes sit for about 5 minutes out of the freezer before tipping them into the blender. This helps to give the blades some traction, so the ice cubes don't just jump around in there like a bunch of bingo balls.

You can't crush ice with most hand-held, stick blenders (though one or two have come on the market now saying that they do do ice.)

Don't attempt to use a food processor to crush ice in. It will almost certainly damage the blades, if not also the plastic bowl.

Manually

To crush ice manually, wrap it in a clean tea towel that you don't prize too much, and then place it on the floor, and bash it with a hammer or a meat pounding mallet. Don't place it on the kitchen counter: you might make everything on the counter jump around, or if you miss the ice, the hammer might take a chip out of the kitchen counter that your Significant Other may make you regret for some time to come. If you have an outside porch or step that you can take it to, even better. The main problem with this manual method is that when an evening gets going and you're running out of Crushed Ice, the last thing you want to do is hand a hammer to someone who's had a few bevies and encourage them to start whacking things.

Cooking Tips
Crushed Ice, because there's more surface area, will cool things more quickly, such as when making ice cream.

Crushed Ice will chill a drink more quickly, though the drink will also get watery more quickly.

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