Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: Substance over style
Not the sexiest-looking stand mixer, but the Titanium Chef Baker has a couple of stand-out features
Pros
- Outstanding performance in most areas
- Built-in scales
- Customisable
Cons
- Can struggle with dough at maximum capacity
- Some parts feel a little plasticky
Sitting somewhere between its professional and basic models, Kenwood’s Titanium Chef Baker offers a few extras that you won’t find on the entry-level kMix or the classic Chef Kitchen.
The most useful of these additions is without a doubt the digital built-in scales, which allow you to weigh ingredients directly into the mixing bowl. There’s also a powerful 1,200W motor, to make tough tasks a little more manageable.
Another addition to the Chef Baker is the introduction of removable top covers, giving you the option to customise the colour of your stand mixer. While this is purely aesthetic, it does set this mixer apart from its competitors.
Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: What do you get for the money?
The Titanium Chef Baker costs £500 at full price, making it quite a bit more expensive than Kenwood’s older models, which typically retail for around £250 to £300 nowadays. It comes with Kenwood’s signature aluminium K Beater, a kneading tool, a stainless steel balloon whisk and a plastic spatula, all of which are dishwasher-safe. The attachments differ in design from cheaper models but aren’t as robust as those supplied with Kenwood’s professional mixers.
There’s one generously sized 5L brushed steel mixing bowl included in the box, which is big enough to cope with 12 eggs, 1.3kg of dough or 2kg of cake batter.
This doubles as your weighing bowl, although the weighing function can also be used with a number of Kenwood’s additional attachments such as the blender and food processor.
It has a decent 1,200W motor that’s well suited to big baking tasks, as well as ten variable speed settings and a pulse function. Design-wise it looks strikingly similar to the other models in the Chef and Titanium Chef range, with a plastic, chunky, squared-off design. However, unlike older models, the Chef Baker has an updated “LightLift” head, which is, unsurprisingly, lighter and easier to manoeuvre when adding ingredients.
It also comes with an interchangeable top cover, allowing you to change the colour of your mixer to some degree. The mixer comes in the Champagne colour as standard, but alternate colours include Sage Green, Mulberry Purple, Juniper Blue and more. However, these have to be bought separately and cost £20 each.
The Titanium Chef Baker’s upgrades and additions are, for the most part, worth having. However, £500 is still a lot of money to spend, regardless of features, so if your budget doesn’t quite stretch, you may want to consider the Kenwood kMix instead. This comes with either a 5l glass bowl or a stainless steel bowl and a 1,000W motor. Alternatively, the non-Titanium Chef Baker has a more classic design and comes with a 4.6l bowl and 1,000W motor. These models don’t come with integrated scales but are all significantly cheaper.
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Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: What’s good about it?
Making cake mix and dough in the Chef Baker is a breeze, and the transition between speeds when mixing and beating is much smoother when compared with Kenwood’s 1,000W kMix model.
In testing, the machine combined ingredients for a light and airy sponge in little over a minute, while six egg whites came to a stiff peak in just three minutes – about the same amount of time as the more powerful Kenwood Titanium Chef Patissier XL.
The built-in scales are seriously useful. They display the weight on a digital, backlit display that sticks out at the base, just below where the bowl sits. You can switch between kilograms and pounds quickly and easily and you can even set timers on the display, helping to ensure you don’t over- or under-mix your ingredients.
Having the option to change the top colour of your mixer is a nice touch, too, particularly if you like playing around with different colours and themes in your kitchen. While it isn’t going to make you a better baker, it’s something you won’t currently find on any other stand mixer.
Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: What could be better?
Unfortunately, there aren’t any additional top cover colours included in the box, which is a shame considering the price. If you do want to change it to something different from the standard champagne colour included, you’ll need to buy these separately for £20 each.
Another design niggle is that the exterior feels a little plasticky, even compared with the entry-level kMix. This, of course, doesn’t have any effect on the performance of the machine but it’s still a little disappointing, as it’s such a step up in so many other areas.
Generally, the Chef Baker performed as well as expected, but while kneading bread dough, it seemed to struggle at capacity, rattling the machine quite aggressively. While it’s not unusual for a stand mixer to be put under pressure while kneading, I expected it to cope better, given how well it performed in other tasks.
It’s hard to say what the long-term effects of this would be on the mixer, as it’s a tough machine built for batch baking. However, it’s something to bear in mind if you plan on filling it to capacity regularly.
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Kenwood Titanium Chef Baker review: Should you buy it?
If you’re planning on batch kneading dough several times a week, you may want to consider one of Kenwood’s bigger, more powerful mixers such as the Titanium Chef Patissier XL to avoid putting too much strain on the machine. Moreover, while the Chef Baker’s customisable top cover is a fun addition, it’s not worth spending the extra just for this.
However, if capacity and price aren’t a concern and you want integrated weighing and smooth cake mixing, then this machine is still definitely worth considering. That extra bit of power ensures mixing cakes and sauces is a breeze, and the benefit of being able to weigh directly into the bowl can’t be overstated. It makes preparation and cleaning up so much simpler.
