Kenwood Chef Titanium KM010 Food Mixer

The Kenwood Chef Titanium KM010 Kitchen Machine looks good and helps me prepare great meals for my family

I’m a work at home Mum and I enjoy cooking, which is just as well as I have three hungry teenagers living at home. Most of the meals that I cook are prepared from base ingredients - no ready made supermarket meals here! Part of the reason for this is that I have a large vegetable garden so have a readily available source of ingredients  but even more importantly I like to know what goes into my food – I have a real aversion to E numbers , chemicals and preservatives ; things that I just don’t want in my food.

Even though I enjoy cooking there are only 24 hours in the day so I have to work efficiently and use as many labour saving devices as possible. The one that I find most useful and couldn’t be without is my Food Mixer. I used to have a pretty basic Magimix which was fine but the model I had struggled with some of the big tasks I asked it to do and so I decided to upgrade. The question was what to buy – there are so many different makes and models. After a lot of research I finally chose the  Kenwood Chef Titanium KM010 and I’m absolutely delighted with it. It makes mixing, beating, chopping and dicing a lot easier. 

What I was looking for 

Powerful Motor 

I knew I needed a pretty powerful machine. I bake a lot of bread, usually in my Panasonic SD-2501WXC, but quite often I like to bake different shaped loaves or bake bread on my bread stone in order to get a really crispy crust. On these occasions I mix and knead my own dough. I can still do this in my breadmaker but I sometimes feel that this puts too much strain on the motor and so I do it by hand (which is hard work) or in my foodmixer.

Dough is hard to knead though and so you have to have a powerful machine or it tends to vibrate and move all over the work surface. The KM010 can mix even heavy sourdough and wholemeal grain recipes. And it isn’t even too noisy – I can carry on listening to the radio whilst it’s mixing.

I can easily make pizza dough in a few minutes using speed 1.

The Titanium KM010 has a 1400 watt motor which is a lot bigger than most mixers and I find is big enough for everything that I want to do.

Large Mixing Bowl

With 5 of us in the family I tend to mix some pretty large quantities. If the mixing bowl is too small, the ingredients splash out all over the work surface. The Kenwood Titanium has a 4.6 litre bowl which is big enough; I certainly wouldn’t want anything smaller. I like the fact that it’s made from stainless steel. The two handles make it very easy to lift and carry from one work surface area to another.

 There’s also a plastic splash cover which works really well in stopping ingredients being thrown out during mixing. There’s a little hatch in the side so you can add extra ingredients without taking the cover completely off.

Size

 The Kenwood KM010 is not small but equally it isn’t overly large. It is 40cm long, 22.7cm wide and 29.7cm high. It weighs 7.7kg, however, so you won’t want to be lugging it about too much. Make sure that you have enough space for it on your worktop.

Note also that it is silver. I think it looks great and it feels like a quality machine, but don’t expect it to be white. There is a plastic cover available for it, in white I think, but I haven’t got one. I suppose it could help to stop the mixer getting things spilled onto it.

There’s a small storage compartment for the electrical lead to be tucked away into when the mixer isn’t being used. Helps to keep the worktop tidy.

Attachments

It comes with 4 bowl tools that are easy to change

K Beater. So called because it’s in the shape of a K! Cynically I had always thought this just stood for Kenwood but the instruction manual says that it has been specially designed to increase efficiency and reduce beating time. Whatever. I do find that it mixes ingredients very well particularly for fruit cakes.

The whisk is nice and large and is in the shape of a balloon. It does its job well – putting lots of air into the mixture to give a greater volume. My meringues, for pavlovas, and chocolate mousses turn out really well when they’re mixed with this whisk.

 The Dough Hook, and the fact that the Kenwood Titanium is strong enough to mix heavy doughs, was probably my main reason for buying this food mixer.  The dough hook really does take all the hard work out of kneading bread. It mixes and kneads quickly and easily so that I can take spend more time on the creative side of breadmaking.

This hasn’t happened to me but apparently if you do try to mix too much dough at once the mixer makes an unusual humming noise to indicate that it’s overloaded; remove some of the mix and it’s fine again.

The Flexi Beater is a pretty good idea. It’s the same shape as the mixing bowl so sweeps close to the sides which means that less of the mix gets stuck to the sides of the bowl. It’s covered in some sort of rubber.  I  adjusted the length of the spindle slightly so that the beater just touches the sides. It was easy to do with the spanner provided by Kenwood. Great for mixing cake ingredients.

What does it come with

Both of these attachments fit onto the top of the foodmixer so you’ll need to make sure there’s enough room above it. I had to move a bookshelf which was a biy of a pity because it was conveniently located for my recipe and cookery books.

It comes with a 1.5 litre glass liquidiser attachment which is great. Because it’s glass it feels nice and solid; much nicer than those made from plastic.  My kids love the milkshakes that I make in it, particularly if I add lots of homemade icecream! They’re really smooth and frothy. The blade can be detached so that it’s easy to clean.

The food processor seems to be ok but I have a separate Kenwood Compact so I can’t say I’ve used it very much. A large feed shoot  comes as standard and there are blades for shredding, dicing, grating and cutting.

Optional extras

There are 18 optional extras available. This has to be good news because whilst I prefer to have single purpose kitchen equipment that is specifically designed for its purpose, there are only so many cupboards and so much worksurface available in my kitchen. So if a machine can do more than one task that is great news.

I already have a pasta maker and ice cream maker but I'm very tempted by thefruit press, citrus juicer and the grain mill.

Other Points

The reviews on Amazon are very good. At the time of writing there were 190 reviews and 164 reviewers had given it 5 * with a further 21 giving it 4*. Very impressive. There is one problem that came up a couple of times in that some people have received the wrong shaft on the flexibeater which means that it gets jammed in the mixer. Kenwood know about the problem so if you call their helpline they’ll quickly replace the shaft for the correct one. Mine’s fine but just keep a watch out for this in case your mixer comes with the wrong bit. 

The Kenwood website makes quite an issue of the fact that this mixer has a Planetary Mixing Action. Most beaters rotate in a circular motion but the Kenwood bowl tools move in a planetary way. This means that, while the beater is revolving in one direction, the socket turns in the opposite direction, making sure all the mixture is picked up from around the bowl, which means that the ingredients are mixed better.

Conclusion

The Kenwood Chef Titanium is not cheap but it does everything that I require from a food mixer, and it does them very well. It’s probably only worth spending this much money if you’re already a competent chef who cooks on a regular basis. If not you may find that the Kenwood Chef Classic KM336 suits you better. It looks as if it’s still a great machine, and gets good reviews, but is quite a lot less expensive; note, however, that it has a much smaller motor.

However, if you are a frequent cook I suspect you will be as delighted as me with the Kenwood Chef Titanium KM010 Food Mixer.