Gordon Ramsay Professional Stand Mixer, 600 Watts

I enjoy cooking and have a variety of kitchen gadgets to make life easier. I have experience of using a Kenwood Chef KM336, so some of what I say will be a comparison with that machine.
As soon as the box arrives, you'll notice that this is a weighty piece of kitchen gadgetry. Inside, there are six pieces - the mixer base unit, three different mixing attachments (a balloon whisk, a beater and a dough hook), the handled stainless steel mixing bowl and the plastic splash guard which fits over the top of the bowl. There is also a small instruction book - this isn't a particularly complicated machine, and warranty information (2 years rather than the standard 1 which is good). Given that this is a celebrity chef endorsed product, I would have liked to see a booklet including some Gordon Ramsay specials, but you are on your own with recipes from the off.
This mixer looks good on the worktop. It's brushed stainless steel finish is classy (the speed dial is plasticky though) and should be hard wearing and robust. Compared to my Kenwood Chef KM336,(which isn't that old) this feels like a more substantial model and looks less dated too. Changing the attachments is easy peasy (although for some reason the instructions have got "clockwise" and "anticlockwise" the wrong way round!) and I like the fact that the splash guard can be fitted over the bowl without removing the attachment. On my Kenwood Chef, fitting the splash guard is more of a fiddle. It is easy to lift and lower the head of the mixer using the dedicated lever on the side. There is a point at the front of the mixer for other attachments (such as mincers etc I should imagine) but there is no information provided with the machine to suggest what these might be, so its utility is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. The flap over the attachment point does have to be open when the machine in use - so don't forget!
The weight of this mixer means it doesn't prance around on your worktop even when dealing with fairly big loads. As with other stand mixers I've used, you do have to stop it occasionally and make sure that everything from around the sides and at the very bottom is being incorporated. Unlike my Kenwood Chef, you can't adjust the height of the power unit in relation to the bowl - it seems pretty well calibrated straight out of the box, but that is a difference. The bowl is a good shape which means that you can mix relatively small quantities or larger ones. The first thing I tried was some to make some pancake batter using just 1 egg and 4oz of flour and although it looked a bit lost in the big bowl, it mixed very well. This machine is also quieter than my Kenwood Chef which is a bonus.
Cleaning up is a doddle. None of the parts can be washed in the dishwasher, but to be honest, it is so easy to clean up with hot soapy water that it would be a bit lazy to machine wash them in any case. A storage container for the three included attachments would have been nice, although you can put all of them inside the stainless steel bowl for storage if you are careful.
Before you purchase this item, consider whether or not the amount of space this takes up can be justified by the use you will get out of it. I wouldn't want to keep lugging it in and out of a cupboard when I wanted to use it, so it really needs to be out on the counter. It certainly looks the part, but there is a space issue. There is also the question of whether or not extra attachments to extend the usefulness of this machine will become widely available. If that is the sort of thing you are interested in then you might want to look elsewhere. However, if you want a stand alone mixer that looks like the ones the TV chefs have, and you like the sleek stainless steel look of this one, then I would recommend it.

Lets start with the good points, the Ramsay stand mixer is a solid piece of kit, brushed metal finish, quiet heavy at about 7kg and quite large. The controls, attachments and bowl all have a quality "heft" and feel well made, in fact the build quality is excellent. The motor is powerful, smooth and not overly noisy. The beater, wisk etc all work well and show little sign of the prevalent "doesn't mix the sides of the bowl" problem common with so many other mixer brands. In short this is a great bit of kit.

However, I'll be staying with my old Kenwood mixer. As I said this is a large and solid bit of kit, it's about 40% larger than a Kenwood which might make it problematic for some kitchens. The controls are solid, but bizarrely the on-off/speed control and the lift control are on different sides, making operation with one side against a wall impossible. The bowl is slightly too large for most domestic uses with the large attachments which are inefficient for the average sized cake batter. The speed control comes with 10 pre-set speeds which isn't as useful as the continuous speed controls (i.e. no presets just a continuous speed scale from very slow to fast) common on other mixers. Also not that the mixer is all you get, no other attachments apart from whisk, beater and dough hook, no blender etc which makes it a large investment for a single use device.

I've not had the beast long enough to properly gauge longevity or reliability but I note that the attachments have a different fitting from either Kenwood or KitchenAid which makes me question its flexibility or long term potential.

I was talking to my wife about my days at sea where I was the ships baker and how I loved my old Hobart machine and would love one in my kitchen now, when I saw the Gordon Ramsay stand mixer and thought it looked like a mini Hobart.I perchased one and have been in my element. As a ex caterer it does all the things I wanted it to do. The other day I got up at 6am to make my bread just like I did all those years ago and by 8.30 was sat down with fresh baked rolls. I think from what I have read from various reviews people who have bought this type of mixer have never used the industrial versions, so therefore are not aware of the time saver that it is. Please remember that in a professional kitchen you do not stand and wathc it going round you get on with something else and go back just to make sure its mixing right.I even got my wife using it now when she made a christmas cake and when I mentioned it to my mother ,who used to work in a school kitchen she jumped at the chance to use it, because again she had used the industrial size model. So I would highly recomend getting one but if its your first time of using it just take it easy and enjoy it. By the way I made a nine pound bread dough in this machine with no problems,almost four times the amount of your average bread maker. Go on give it a try. All I want now is the mincer attatchments for this machine and there will be no stopping me.