$1,500! That's more than my car is worth.
Cinzia L., fifth most recent reviewer of the TM6 model, says she's on her fourth purchase, which would seem to raise questions about the Thermomix's reliability and lifespan, but then she indicates that actually she's been giving these $1500 appliances away as gifts?! Anyway, I kind of would like to try one of these out but I don't have $1500 to spare at the moment, so maybe I should try to find Cinzia and befriend her.
Can't find anything in TFA but could have sworn this was a topic of discussion/derision here ages back one of the many times when McMegan was going on and on and on about her Thermomix.
4: McMegan also apparently gives these away as gifts, or at least suggests doing so, but I don't know that it's worth finding McMegan and trying to convince her to be my friend. I can't even bear to read her columns.
Boycotting the WP solves that problem.
I know that it is objectively very easy to weigh ingredients and we have a kitchen scale. But if a recipe asks me to weigh ingredients, I just don't use that recipe.
It seems like a crazy idea, but this thread is almost convincing: https://www.reddit.com/r/thermomix/comments/15k7cro/would_you_recommend_the_tm6_to_a_knowledgable_and/?rdt=43569
I guess the name is a combination of "Thermo" for "heat" and "MIX" for "1009"?
My co-worker who is from Morocco has one of those, and she LOVES it. It seemed to me that if you regularly made hollondaise as a professional chef it could be worth it, because it can heat and blend at the same time.
I think you make Hollandaise sauce by mixing mayo and relish.
Not buying until I see the Ron Popeil demo. My late night companion during the Lost Years™
My wife's sister has one, and has used it for years. Primarily, I think, for Czech soups and sauces, rather than anything more involved. I don't think hers is a recent model, though.
We have a food processor but barely use it. We made baby food with it, but that hasn't been a need in a long time.
It seems like this appliance is most useful for people who eat a lot of cream-based soups or sauces, or who like custard, and fortunately for my budget I am none of those people. I did recentishly buy a stupidly expensive Cuckoo rice cooker, of whose functions I use only about 15%, but still love a lot, so maybe one day I'll buy a Thermomix just to make caramelized onions and onsen eggs.
Ooh. French onion soup making is useful.
Oh my god! I could have been using the "Keep Warm" function on my Cuckoo rice cooker to make onsen eggs this whole time! Stupid, stupid.
According to TikTok, the Cuckoo can also caramelize onions. Well, that's $1500 saved.
Supporting onsen culture can raise the birth rate in Japan too.
I somehow imagine that if the Thermomix is scaled for European kitchens, it's not scaled for (almost) four teenage appetites plus me and Jammies.
Based on the thread in 8, I'm realizing that the part of cooking I like least is the executive functioning part, and I bet it doesn't help with that, either.
So an addled large family in Texas is not the target audience.
The lady at the Holiday Inn was very insistent that they don't mix.
I got an Instant Pot after the conversations here about them, and I barely use it -- but it was cheap so I don't feel a sense of obligation.
Based on the thread in 8, I'm realizing that the part of cooking I like least is the executive functioning part, and I bet it doesn't help with that, either.
This suggests that the pre-selected recipes help with that: https://www.wired.com/review/thermomix-tm6
Recipes on the machine are designed to keep the ball rolling. You add one ingredient, often pouring it into the blender jar, which--trumpet fanfare!--weighs it, then you tap next and add the following item by weight. If it's a heating or mixing step, it will do things like tee up two minutes of spinning at speed setting five at 225 degrees. You'll soon notice how quickly this moves things along. If you're the kind of person who tries to jam out a week's worth of food on a Sunday afternoon, this is your new best friend.
The Instant Pot makes very good chicken and rice. But I'm the only one that likes chicken and rice here.
Based on the thread in 8 it sounds like these are popular in professional kitchens, which makes sense. They sound very useful, but wow, that's a lot of money.
It's like when people go to Williams Sonoma and buy a $1,200 coffee machine.
I assume someone must. They have them in the store.
22: That it actually helps with. There are recipes for salmon with rice and veg where it tells you when to put a specific ingredient in and at the end you get fish with sauc, veg and rice.
Or what 28 said.
I do like the Instant Pot, but I rarely use it as a one-size-fits-all cooker. I barely use the sauté function, or the slow cooking function. I just use it as an electric pressure cooker that has a keep warm function. Being able to cook cuts of meat that take a long time to cook for tagines or guláš is great and knowing that it'll just keep warm until I need to do something with it is good.
The saute function isn't great, but better than having to clean another pan.
Yeah, the IP is clearly physically designed to be a pressure cooker and not a slow cooker (metal insert, heat entirely from below). A $20 Hamilton Beach slow cooker from the grocery store does better.
I've heard that more expensive multicookers can actually perform both functions, but I have enough cabinet space that I'd rather just own two objects and get the bonus ability to be lazier about washing them both.
Heebie,
I'm curious: where did you read that Europeans were gaga over this Thermomix thing? I ask b/c the Europeans I know don't exactly have the sort of dosh to splash out for a $1500 kitchen gadget.
I have the TM5 - I bought it from a Spanish friend after she made a mushroom risotto for me in record time. Since I bought it though, I mainly use it as a blender and to make bread and various cakes. It's definitely useful for things that would require stirring things in the heat for a long time (i.e. the risotto), and I'm sure other more adventurous cooks will find amazing uses for it. But, from my perspective, massively overhyped.
The weighing function sucks btw - very sensitive to any movement of the container and not very accurate at all (I'd say +/- 15%).
That would make it useless for baking.
21, 38: honestly I wouldn't worry, they're built like battleships, and the kind of Europeans who own them are the kind that have their lawyer deal with the wealth management banker. For some reason, though, much more Central Europe and also Italy than France. I think if you buy two the manufacturer throws in your very own Spießbürger.
35: What the Instant Pot slow cooker function is good at is cooking dried beans without soaking them first over. 7-12 hour period. Shorter for white delicate beans.
Apparently the Thermomix has a reverse blix function, but I don't really want weapons of mass destruction lost in the kitchen.
re: 42
My wife's sister (and I think her Mum, too) have them. They aren't even remotely wealthy. Part time clerical worker, for the former, and ex-farm-hand / shop worker for the latter.
But the central Europe thing pans out. I do think they go in for really big expensive kitchen items there. When we got married my wife's parents bought us a huge (huge!) set of Zepter pots and pans which must have cost them many months salary.
38: I mean, you can have trends that no one can afford. You could say, "Joe Rogan bros love cybertrucks," and it doesn't mean that most of them can drop that kind of money on one. Just that they know and covet them.
I think giving expensive gifts to your daughters on their marriage was pretty common until recently (like past 50 years) when the weddings got really expensive for your average bride's parents. My parents got a set of actual silverware and a silver tea/coffee set from my mom's parents. But that was before the Hunt Brothers.
My grandfather worked in the rail yard. It was a union job and he raised four kids on that salary. But he never owned a car.
re: 48
Yeah, I guess. Also, we paid for our wedding, so they didn't have any expense there.
31, 32: No one has purchased the $1200 coffee maker ever. It's just there to make people feel better about buying the $600 model.
I thought the $600 one was to make you feel like you need the $1,200 one so you don't have the same coffee pot as everyone in the subdivision.
I've been debating whether it would be dumb for me to get a "real" food processor or stand mixer. I want to start baking things, but I also have to learn to bake so I'm worried I will end up with something that sits in a cabinet. I've made marzipan* the last few years and know from experience that a cheaper food processor likely won't have enough power to mix and I didn't have a great experience with a hand mixer either. I want to bake pies and cookies eventually.
I'd rather not spend more than $200 but the options below that point seem questionable, either for durability or power. I could spend somewhat more (not $1500), I just don't know if it's worth it. But I'm unlikely to start baking without some kind of appliance to help.
*I've shaped it into a pig by hand, something I started doing out of necessity because of pandemic shortages. I used pre-made baking marzipan one year and that didn't taste as good, possibly because I didn't bake it.
As an opinionated american living in Europe I would say, no, I've never seen it in someone's kitchen. It sounds like a step or two up from our slow cooker, which we do use a lot. But is chopping for the stew all that hard? No. Is actually measuring ingredients so time consuming? And our slow cooker seems very american, I can't imagine many Italians using one. Maybe this is more popular for northern european food. But our Danish friends here are such good cooks, I can't imagine them (ok, her) using one.
It also reminds me of a breadmaker. But bread from those always strikes me as just OK. My wife makes a crazy good sourdough, but she kind of stopped after the pandemic ended. So maybe if you made it easier we would have fresh bread more often. This strikes me as the stew or stir fry pot for someone for whom OK is fine and who sucks at cooking.
The one thing that sounded tempting was a comment that it makes Indian sauces much easier. I've been thinking about tackling Indian food at home, and I do find it a bit daunting.
I am kind of impressed by the concept of creating a $1500 kitchen appliance that is only useful for cooking the cuisine of a country where most of the population earns less than that per year, and the rest all have cooks.
Well, "only good for Indian food" might not be the correct inference. "Also good for..."
But yeah, I'd much rather have an Indian cook than buy that machine.
53 If you plan to bake the Kitchenaid stand mixer is a standout. Can't say much about new models but the one my wife and I got 40 years ago is still going after regular heavy use. It's just now starting to have some issues but we're reluctant to buy a new one because of general enshittification, which certainly has been the case w.r.t. Kitchenaid dishwashers.
Our Kitchenaid stand mixer still works perfectly after 25 years. Or at least I assume it does. It's still in the box. We use a hand mixer.
I sometimes get attracted by kitchen gadgets. The catalog from an online food/ingredient shop we've used came before Christmas and was full of stuff like cast iron bread cloches, and the like. Many of which looked great--very attractive as shiny kitchen objects--but where I just couldn't justify spending 200-300 quid on a bit of cast iron I'd use twice a year.
Similarly, I got a nice Japanese knife (nothing crazy, sub £100) for a birthday recently, but, tbh, the knives I already had were just as good.
There are two kinds of irritating people about kitchen stuff - the ones who are trying to build some kind of laboratory high-throughput screening rig or aesthetic fantasia, and the ones who won't shut up about how you just need a big sharp knife. I am in group two. That said I remember a Thermomix discourse in another place where it was decided you should pronounce it with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable, like a Roman taxi driver says "Termini!"
We are moderately disappointed with our KitchenAid mixer that we bought to replace the one that died after a decade, because the beaters cannot be adjusted to the proper height to mix down to the bottom of the bowl. Given that I use it three times a week for bread it will probably die soon and there's a stupid expensive magic Swedish mixer I want to replace it.
We had to have some inner part (belt?) replaced once in the last 20 years, and that was because we tried using the pasta attachment which was too high a load. Grease started leaking out. The mixing paddle keeps flaking its coating.
I was waiting for takeout at a pizza place in Amsterdam this summer and they had professional kitchen equipment catalogs on the tables for people to read. Better than porn- did you know there's a series of machines that can mix dough, let it rise under optimal conditions, flatten the dough, assemble pizzas, and bake at 800 degrees?
re: 60
Yeah, I am mostly in group two, also. As per above, we have an Instant Pot that we use as a pressure cooker now and again, and an air fryer for "crispy" things.
Everything else, it's an 8" chef's knife or afore-mentioned Nakiri and steel pans.
I am still sometimes enticed enough to window shop for other things, though, but I never buy them.
We have an instant pot that was left out for free on the street. Maybe a risky thing to do in Boston but it works fine. Mostly make sticky rice or beans.
My favorite single-purpose gadget I've bought in recent years is a tortilla press.
Bread machine sucks at baking bread but is decent for kneading and proofing.
65: I mean, what good would studying the Thermomix do you when the barbarians are at the gate?
That said I remember a Thermomix discourse in another place where it was decided you should pronounce it with a heavy emphasis on the first syllable, like a Roman taxi driver says "Termini!"
What are the alternatives?? Thermomix, like a your mom joke?
16. CR-0655 for the win, 3 quart durability, perfect basmati every time takes two twelve-inch remixes or half a string quartet to beep. My dad, an actual European who likes to cook, uses mostly century-old gear salvaged from the house he grew up in. My cousins don't complain about brutal inflation last year, but it was worse there than here, though it's true people there do like kitchen gadgets, inexplicably to me...
66.1: Do you live on the marathon route?
68: well, and like "thermometer", I suppose.
I have a small slow cooker I don't use. But also it was a gift.
My favorite pronunciation thing, which I think is from one of you but in the other place, is to say "Popsicles" like it's a Greek name.
53: I got along well with a hand mixer for years for cookie dough. You have to be a little selective about what you buy, but it's basically fine unless you're making very large batches (like 3X a normal recipe). I'd suggest starting with a better quality hand mixer, and if you're using it a lot, then consider a stand mixer. The food processor, I have a relatively cheap one. It does make pie dough faster, but making it by hand isn't particularly inconvenient. Maybe it's 5 min with the processor and 15 min by hand? I do like having it, though. My favorite use is grating / slicing, which is so fast compared to doing it by hand.
The stand mixer is in the basement, but it's more cold enough that the spiders are lethargic.
For slicing, we have a half-assed thing that isn't quite a mandoline because you can't adjust anything. It works ok.
My sister just sent me cookies, so I don't need to bake this week.
77: I leave the stand mixer on the countertop; that and the air fryer are the two that don't have to get put away all the time. I get similarly swoony about the idea of new kitchen tools, but don't really have anywhere to store them. The one that I'd consider is a larger food processor, my current handles 2 cups or so, which is good for small projects (chop nuts, etc.) but not large enough for most baking.
I'm sure that we'd be fine without the stand mixer, but have slowly accumulated attachments like a shredder and pasta roller that are occasionally useful - particularly for shredding big blocks of cheese or lots of veggies at once, or the rare instance where home made pasta is the thing I want to devote an afternoon to.
We have a hand cranked pasta roller and the unofficial rule is that the pasta shall be started as the water is set on the stove to boil, and finished by the time the water is boiling.
82: Wow, that's strict! As long as it turns out delicious, it sounds like a great process and limit.
Can you make cheese slices in a pasta roller by flattening a cheese?
Start with like mozzarella and work up to parm.
77: thanks! I keep trying to remind myself that people made these things before electricity. I think I'm going with a lower cost food processor as more likely to get immediate use for a lower up-front cost. I don't have a lot of room on my counter and could probably leave a small-ish food processor out but definitely not a quality stand mixer.
I asked my wife if she'd heard of this. And she said, "oh that sounds like what [danish friend] was selling." So, not only does our danish friend who's a great cook have one, she was doing network marketing for them where my wife was invited over for a demo & offered a post-purchase consultation.
It was the "Bimby," though, an Italian branded German model:
https://www.vorwerk.com/it/it/s/shop/bimby-tm6#description
I keep trying to remind myself that people made these things before electricity.
I wonder if people actually did make food processors before electricity. I can sort of imagine a kind of early Victorian industrial scale food mincer or something?
re: 88
You can still get non-electric food processors now. I had some primitive one when I was a student. You turned a little handle. But I think that was a non-electric analogue of the electric version, i.e. inspired by the electric ones.
Mandolines are old, though. 18th or 19th century. Meat grinders/mincers area also 19th century.*
* my wife's parents have an old manual one that they still use regularly in their kitchen.
I've definitely seen a couple of old sausage grinders from before electricity. It's the sort of thing a deer hunter or old Italian guy would have in the garage, though probably not actually use anymore, like grandpa's wine press.
I know someone who regularly uses and recommends a manual oat flaker (not this brand, but something similar: https://www.happy-mills.com/grain-flakers/eschenfelder-grain-flaker-with-wood-funnel.html ).
I could buy my oats directly from the farmer with that. If I knew anyone who grew oats.
We are moderately disappointed with our KitchenAid mixer that we bought to replace the one that died after a decade
AIUI, they replaced some of the internal gearing with plastic, and now they're much less durable. We still have the refurbished one my dad got us for our wedding almost 25 years ago, which gets semi regular use, but probably bread dough just once a month on average (if that).
there's a stupid expensive magic Swedish mixer I want to replace it.
Those are apparently ace for bread dough; not clear to me whether they're otherwise better. Definitely bulkier, and I'm skeptical about the bowl situation for cleaning.
86: I somewhat resent the space my stand mixer takes up, and honestly probably would not buy another Kitchen Aid (it was a gift, but it does not seem that newer ones are as durable as those of yore). It's not broken exactly, but a thick cookie dough has damaged the gears. The food processor I have is a Cuisinart 5 cup (looks like it's no longer made?) that I bought after inheriting a miniature 2 cup one and using it more often than expected.
I bake a lot (pies, cakes, cookies, occasionally kneaded yeast bread), and I have a lot of equipment, including a Cuisinart food processor and KitchenAid, and the thing I use most is my dinky little hand mixer. It works fine for cakes and cookies, and it's easy to get out and easy to clean up. I sometimes use the food processor for pies, but it's so easy to over process the butter that I find it's easier to just cut the butter and mix the pie crust by hand. I'm still glad I have my KitchenAid, though, as it's useful for large batches, or when I'm making Stella Parks' oreos. Also, it was a wedding gift, and it's a beautiful creamy light green that is a delight to look at.
Nothing is as fun as an old hand-cranked egg beater.
88: one of Highgate's historic shopkeeper families had a gas engine (gas in the normal sense, not US - a weird internal combustion engine but running on towngas) to drive a big mincer for their butcher operation.
running on towngas
Taco Bell is the other thread.
our most specialized kitchen kit is a wet grinder for dosa & idli batter & we *adore* it. has these marvelous stone rollers & a powerful purring motor, sounds like the flat is going to smoothly take off ... makes great batter too.
love & heavily use my kuhn rikon stovetop pressure cooker.
we both use the drug scale (him coffee, me tea) & his middle-aged rancilio espresso machine with the aftermarket temperature controller was just revived by a young guy working out of univ village in albany - thank god bc replacing it would be $$$. also v happy tea tech is pretty low key, a temp control kettle is pretty easy to come by these days. the oxo one is reasonable & works fine for me at the office. we have the prettier stag one at home. my most important tea tech is the thick darkness of the closet in my office combined with the depth of the shelf where i have squirreled away the backstock of tea discretely away from the awareness of my better half.
our kitchenaide bench mixer is reconditioned & ~25 years old, works reasonably well. a couple of the middle gears went awol years ago, but as we mostly use it at the low & high ranges it isn't really an issue.
fake accent - if the bread making you want to do isn't enriched doughs (e g., brioche) you really do not need a mixer.* liquids & rest are your friends, you don't need much kneading with them on your side. happy to type up some tips if you are interested.
* & you can make enriched doughs without a mixer, but it's higher risk & you will have to knead for reals.